AMD Radeon R9 290 Pro Reviews

The R9 290 presents a bit of a challenge to us as reviewers. On the one hand, it delivers enough performance to mostly outpace the $100-pricier (at least, as of this writing) Nvidia GeForce GTX 780. It also gets close enough to the stock speeds of the $549 Radeon R9 290X to make that card not worth the extra money for most gamers. That’s an impressive feat for AMD, given that the 290X itself delivered performance close enough to the $1,000 GTX Titan to make that card more or less irrelevant. AMD has certainly shaken up the graphics card market with the aggressive pricing of its last two high-end cards. But as impressed as we are with the Radeon R9 290’s performance, we have a feeling most gamers, if they dropped an R9 290 into their system, would find the card’s excessive fan noise too much to be comfortable with—especially in the long-term.

The R9 290 isn't without shortcomings, though you're probably already aware of them if you read our R9 290X review. Both of AMD's new cards run very hot, with the latest hitting 95 degrees in a matter of minutes when gaming. Naturally, this causes the card's fans to spin up, but if that's not enough to keep its temperatures in line the GPU could be downclocked, even if that didn't happen to us with either 290.

The AMD Radeon R9 290 has solid performance, is overclocking friendly and happens to be priced right. AMD now owns the $399 price point when it comes to desktop gaming graphics cards!

AMD has definitely gone on the warpath with the Radeon R9 290 4GB graphics card. Seemingly going straight for the juggular of NVIDIA, the R9 290 is able to perform better than a GeForce GTX 780 for $100 less (which seems like deja vu from last month) while at the same time willing to undercut its own flagship to nearly make it irrelevant to anyone other than those that have the temerity to demand ONLY the best at any cost. It's not a perfect card as there are still the issues we saw with the R9 290X present here including fan noise, uncomfortably high temperature GPUs and even variable clock rates that can make estimating performance more difficult. In fact, the R9 290 is louder than the R9 290X is by default, thanks to the move AMD made to increase fan speed to insure a performance victory over the GTX 780. We are also seeing availability issues with Hawaii - finding any in stock has been a struggle for gamers even before the release of the R9 290. And I think the R9 290 will be significantly more desired than the 290X thanks to the pricing adjustment.

AMD's new Radeon R9 290 delivers quite impressive performance numbers. Averaged over all our games and resolutions, the card exactly matches the performance of the Radeon R9 290X in "Quiet" mode, and the difference is just - 6%, very little, compared to the R9 290X in "Uber" mode. The difference between the highest end SKU and the next tier is typically 10%-15%. The card also beats NVIDIA's GTX 780 by 1% and only ends up 5% slower than the GTX Titan, which is more than twice as expensive. One cornerstone for this impressive performance is AMD's updated driver: it switches the upper fan speed limit from 40% to 47%, which yields higher performance because it allows the card to throttle later. In our testing, the card barely throttled and ran above 925 MHz almost all the time. Typically, such a change would be delivered through a BIOS update, not a driver update, but AMD might have worried that updating the BIOS would be too complicated for editors. They did confirm that this is a permanent change, not only part of the reviewer driver. Other cards are not affected by this driver and do not see a performance improvement.

With the launch of the 290 and AMD’s promotional efforts we can’t help but feel that AMD is trying to play both sides of the performance/noise argument by shipping the card a high performance configuration, and using its adjustability to simultaneously justify its noise as something that can be mitigated. This is technically correct (ed: the best kind of correct), but it misses the point that most users are going to install a video card and use it as it's configured out of the box. To that end adjustability is a great feature and we’re happy to see such great efforts made to offer it, but adjustability cannot preclude shipping a more reasonable product in the first place. Had the 290 shipped in its original 40% fan configuration, it wouldn’t be knocking on the GTX 780’s door any longer, but it would have been in a spot where its balance of price, performance, and noise would have made for an attractive product. Instead AMD has shipped the 290 with the equivalent of uber mode as the default, and in the process has failed to meet the needs of the majority of their customers.

The new R series bring with it some cool technology like Mantle, TrueAudio and bridgeless CrossFire technology on the 290 variants. Money talks, though, and in the end, AMD has again done a fantastic job of pricing the new model exactly where it needs to be. We can't wait to see what companies do with both the R9 290 and R9 290X as we come into the holiday season.

What this all means then is that there is simply zero reason to spend more than this on a graphics card right now, unless you absolutely can't cope with your graphics card running at 93ºC. The non-Ti GTX 780 is still quieter and cooler, with similar performance, but you will have to pay a premium to get that. And what of the touted Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti? Well, that may well turn out to be the quickest version of a GK110 card we've ever seen, but Nvidia has already announced it will be retailing for around $699. We think that really prices it out of this particular graphics battle. So, if you're just after fantastic, high-end gaming performance the R9 290 is all the graphics card you could need right now.

Sometimes, being an early adopter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Proud owners of the R9 290X will probably know exactly what we’re talking about since their new purchase has nearly been matched by a card that is much more affordable and can overclock quite well. This is nonetheless great news for gamers who can now buy a $399 R9 290 that has no problem competing against NVIDIA cards that cost upwards of $649 just a few weeks ago. The amount of value on tap here is simply astounding provided you’re willing to put up with higher noise, heat and power consumption.

Almost as powerful as the mighty R9 290X, but much cheaper making it more of a bargain