Xfx r9 290 dd

paulstung

New member
I just want to give Tom a shout out and a thank you, for another great product review, as a result I picked up a pair of the R9 290 DD's, and have had them for over a week and have just got around to testing them, and they don't disappoint, after a open and run valley benchmark, I couldn't hear the fans at all, and they are just set up on the motherboard on the box. The top card reached 72, and the lower card just 51, I'm overly shocked, by how quiet they are.

I'm running it on my 52" for testing and the setting were, 1280 x 720, preset custom, quality high, and tesselation was off, FPS 196.4, and a score of, 4947, with min fps of, 9.7 and a max of 322,1.

Cheers Tom you hit the nail on the head again, what a card, not only is it one of the prettiest cards I've ever seen but one of the quietest I've heard.
 
You need to test it on 1080p to stress the cards. The temps will rise as res rises becauses it makes a bigger load for them to process. Even at 1080p though its a joke for these cards still so it shouldn't be that bad.
 
I've got a spare 1080 monitor, but I can't find the power brick for it anywhere. How quiet they are doesn't make a whole load of difference to be honest they'll be getting wet in a week or so.
 
Yeah I have just got the Black Edition of this card and it sits at 69-70c gaming at 1920x1200, but I do have the fan set at 90% while I game, I dont think my fractal r3 case moves much air. But its still no louder then my 6950 wit the 1fan blower cooler, so not a big deal, plus when your gaming you cant hear the fans anyway.

But I might lower the fan speed untill it gets to 75c as thats still pretty cool for a 290.
 
Well then it won't look as pretty? That cooler is what makes the card:p

I no mate, I was going to leave them alone for a while and then add them to the loop at a later date, but I just can't resist getting them wet now. I wouldn't normally go for a non reference card, as it's a waste of money, ripping the after market cooler off but they were a bargain, at £289 a piece with a 60gb Kingston SSD with each one. They were the cheapest 290's I could find.
 
Lol, not a bad idea. I thought it was even better than that, there was a Battlefield 4 offer on the box, but sadly it was out of date.
 
Thats really good to hear as I've been holding off using XFX cards as I thought they still had the build quality issues that they used to have back in the 7xxx days.
Best looking cards of this gen I must say.
 
I agree mate, NBD has got me thinking about leaving them out of the loop again, it would be a shame, not to see them.
 

ipvqDZu.png

I try waay to hard


Jokes aside the way people have done it in the past appears to be removing the heatsink and using a universal block over the gpu's core itself while keeping the fans on to cool the VRM or something. I'm looking for the guide I saw somewhere relatively recently. It was done with a reference AMD card but still.
 
Last edited:
I do think you could possibly put a full cover waterblock on then (completely remove the heatsink) mount the shroud back on somehow. It would loose al function, but still look pretty good if you do it right.
 
Any block will fit mate, as your right it is a reference pcb, we are on about trying to go hybrid, so that the fans and shroud could still be used as well as a water block.

I'm hopefully getting the EK Water Blocks EK-FC R9-290X Full Cover Water Block - Acetal+Nickel, or the XSPC Razor R9 290X / 290 VGA Waterblock, I'm still undecided, the XSPC would look cool, as I'm using the Raystorm cpu block, but, I'd have to paint the clear acrylic part white to match my painted cpu block, but I don't like their crossfire bridge, and they're £20 more than the EK.

With the Ek I can almost get a block and back plate, for the price of the XSPC block. On a plus side the EK crossfire bridge, is sexy.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top