The big problem with the R9 290 was the heat, so does the MSI Twin Frozr unleash the beast?
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MSI R9 290 Gaming Review
- Thread starter tinytomlogan
- Start date
The big problem with the R9 290 was the heat, so does the MSI Twin Frozr unleash the beast?
Continue Reading
Excalabur50
Well-known member
Another quality review and what an amazing card for the price and to see the numbers jump with Mantle....just wow, going to be interesting to see how much further Mantle goes as the technology matures
WYP
News Guru
Good review as always Tom.
mantle gave a good increase in performance there, especially given the CPU your using.
Only time will tell how much mantle will benefit gamers, lets hope Thief comes to market with full support for ALL GCN GPUs and works in Crossfire unlike BF4 at present.
One thing i will add here, the PCB on this MSI card is reference,so it is watercooling capable (checked by EK here), but also contains some of higher quality components compared to the reference card (MSI military class) and likely could be a higher binned chip.
Definitely worth considering for those water cooling or planning to watercool a 290, especially those who can't watercool immediately considering the stock card's noise levels and throttling. It also has a good looking backplate at stock
mantle gave a good increase in performance there, especially given the CPU your using.
Only time will tell how much mantle will benefit gamers, lets hope Thief comes to market with full support for ALL GCN GPUs and works in Crossfire unlike BF4 at present.
One thing i will add here, the PCB on this MSI card is reference,so it is watercooling capable (checked by EK here), but also contains some of higher quality components compared to the reference card (MSI military class) and likely could be a higher binned chip.
Definitely worth considering for those water cooling or planning to watercool a 290, especially those who can't watercool immediately considering the stock card's noise levels and throttling. It also has a good looking backplate at stock
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AverageNinja
Average Penis Too
That's one sexy card! AMD is back in the high-end competition 
SieB
New member
Looks like the Tri-X is still king of the third party coolers for the 290s.
Hottest I have seen mine go is 74*c and that was during TW2 running round a section where the GPU is at 100% most of the time for a good 30mins.
The MSI one definitely still does a good job though, one thing I did notice though is in the GPU-Z in the review says the MSI gaming has 72 GPixles and 180 GTexels. My Tri-X only has 60 GPixles and 160 GTexeles, GPU-Z may be reading it wrong? Current version is 0.7.7, I noticed the on in the review is version 0.7.4.
Hottest I have seen mine go is 74*c and that was during TW2 running round a section where the GPU is at 100% most of the time for a good 30mins.
The MSI one definitely still does a good job though, one thing I did notice though is in the GPU-Z in the review says the MSI gaming has 72 GPixles and 180 GTexels. My Tri-X only has 60 GPixles and 160 GTexeles, GPU-Z may be reading it wrong? Current version is 0.7.7, I noticed the on in the review is version 0.7.4.
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In the end I called it a day and jumped to the green ship, having got my refund. 
theroflcopta
New member
great review
Awesome review dude, but people commenting you gotta remember pretty much all AMD cards are terrible deals right now. The prices are drastically inflated because of krypto currency mining. When this thing launched it was like 400 USD and it was a really compelling deal. Now it's up at about the 600 USD amount which is very unreasonable for gamers but not so much for miners. So we just have to wait untill people stop buying them by the buttload for mining and we can finally get back our price/performance on the AMD side.
Awesome review dude, but people commenting you gotta remember pretty much all AMD cards are terrible deals right now. The prices are drastically inflated because of krypto currency mining. When this thing launched it was like 400 USD and it was a really compelling deal. Now it's up at about the 600 USD amount which is very unreasonable for gamers but not so much for miners. So we just have to wait untill people stop buying them by the buttload for mining and we can finally get back our price/performance on the AMD side.
barnsley
born in a.....
Maybe where you are from ^_^. They're not too bad right now, the 290x are the ones that have been the most effected here.
WYP
News Guru
This is mostly in america, here in the UK/Europe the prices are not affected as much.
I think the consoles being in the red corner, makes future game optimisation favour AMD over nVidia. This might take time to fully filter through but we have seen how consoles brought poor ports to pc, and the console market is were the money is at so unlikely to change. With that in mind the developers will likely also go AMD and in a long winded way means that the 290 is a better deal than the 780.
I went with the Gaming series Motherboard and Graphic card combo. This was likely as a result of TTL product placement, I mean positive reviews
I also had corsair mouse, psu and ram. The weak minded fool that I am.
I went with the Gaming series Motherboard and Graphic card combo. This was likely as a result of TTL product placement, I mean positive reviews
I also had corsair mouse, psu and ram. The weak minded fool that I am.
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