PowerColor R9 290X 4GB OC Pro Reviews

The new R9-290X is a very powerful card and Powercolor added a bit more to the stack with a factor OC, now just waiting for adequate cooler and this can be a real monster

PowerColor's R9 290X OC is basically the AMD R290X reference design with a BIOS that increases clocks by 30 MHz, and a sticker on the fan hub. While these changes are slim, they do not come at any price premium. We see a 1% performance improvement over the AMD reference design in uber mode. It would have been nice to see an overclock on memory, too, for some extra performance. Still, the card is faster than NVIDIA's GTX Titan which still costs $1000. If you look at our selection of games, you can see that depending on the game, either NVIDIA or AMD have the upper hand. PowerColor's latest card does not improve on power consumption of the AMD reference design, which means non-gaming power consumption, like multi-monitor and Blu-ray, is still really bad. We do see a slight improvement during gaming, which is surprising. A higher-clocked card would normally consume more power, not less. My best guess is that production variances cause this difference, but PowerColor's card also runs 1°C cooler, which affects power consumption. Still, overall power consumption is kinda high.

As a reference card the R9 290X OC from PowerColor delivers great performance at a great price point for that performance, but the bugs and issues have to be addressed to bring its stock up. We look forward to checking out PowerColor's non-reference cards (LCS versions) to see how they fare against these hot temps and noise.