I'm a bit curious why the temperature & noise page was copied from the 290x instead of getting it's own sample review?
Incorrect they have been tested independently, the cards are identical in terms of noise and cooling though.
Very nice review indeed. Got to love the card, great perfromance for the price. Here in Serbia i'm seeing Sapphire 290 for 349€.
Same goes for me, that is why they have possibility to move target to 80/70. And gave users ability to balance heat vs noise on their own. Btw, google for water cooled OC on 290x.
Let's see what other cooling solutions bring. They are certainly needed. Again: Great review. :thumbup:
Great review boss Great little card too! I was wondering when(if)bf4 has some buggyness gone will you add it to the games list?
Wow, what card, and what a bloody price , its around some of the 770s new prices, and it demolishes them, and its also over £100 cheaper than nearly all of the new 780 prices, which it also beats, AMD have just killed their 2 week old 290X, the 780, and the 770 in one fell swoop, if only they had a better cooler, as its all they need, only thing letting them down that, i was going to get an X when the customs come out, but theres zero point now, its dead, custom 290s is where its at now, unbelievable, well played AMD, well bloody played!!!
AMD did incredibly stupid thing with the noise. The sound is absolutely nerve-racking. Cheap trick. No one wants to listen to card like that. Custom ones probably end up costing a lot more when they start fixing issues caused by AMD. Custom PCB is probably needed too.
Have to agree, they have to change that cooler, it must be harming sales, imagine if they came out with Titan like coolers, they'd have cleaned up, instead of just falling short.
Great review as always. The card performs exactly as good as I expected, it's a great little number. This will be the go to card for many as soon as custom cooled models are widely available. One thing that surprised me was the price, I was expecting to see it at around £349, but you can snag up a Sapphire for £319, that's incredible value for money! I'm expecting these prices to drop to sub £300 by the time custom versions come out. I mean wow!!! Only one thing AMD, next time you release a major new card, make sure you don't put people off by sticking a crappy cooler on it!!! @Hilbert - I've been thinking about this for a while, wouldn't it be better to post the graphics score for 3Dmark11/13 etc? The P score is heavily influenced by the cpu and ram and it doesn't really tell us much about the brute power of these gpus. What I'm trying to say, a 290 with my cpu would score about the same in 3Dmark P score as say a 7970GE with that 3960X you're using which can be misleading. I would definitely appreciate to see the graphics score in gpu reviews
Did any of you see Tom's R290 review? He put a retail R290X vs his two review samples R290 and R290X, and oddly enough the retail R290X was slower then the 2 review samples and the 780 across the board and just barley above the 770. Could have been a fluke, but we know how shady GPU company's can be, and what they have been caught with in the past.
