Nvidia have already announced it's going to be priced around the $699 mark, so no matter how much extra they can get out of the GK110 silicon it's going to struggle to justify gamers shelling out the extra $300 over the 290 for it. Sure they can talk about how it's the 'real' top card, but anyone with an R9 290 can be quietly smug they got the better deal with the same levels of performance.īut what of Nvidia's GTX 780 Ti response? Well, we can essentially ignore it when we're talking about £320 / $400 graphics cards. There must be a good deal of buyer's remorse happening right now for the poor folk that pre-ordered the 290X. It's not noticeably faster, runs hotter and makes a hell of a racket in comparison with the straight 290. It does mean though that the Radeon R9 290X is now essentially irrelevant.

Unless you really need the double precision performance of the GTX Titan for your professional graphics applications, there's simply no need to spend a penny more. £320 / $400 is about right for a top-end, performance graphics card. In essence then the Radeon R9 290 is an absolute blazing graphics card. It's still nowhere near the same aural performance as the Titan-esque chrome cooler on Nvidia's top-end cards, but it's a definite improvement over the noise levels of the 290X. Keeping it below the 290X's 55% max fan speed does little to harm the performance but makes it noticeably quieter. The straight 290 had a little driver tweak just before launch - possibly due to the reaction to the 290X's noise levels - which limited the fan speed to 47%. While you may not be able to see the difference though, you might be able to hear i. I'm pretty confident, because of general fluctuations in frame rate, that even if you had the FRAPS FPS counter up in the corner of the screens you'd still struggle to tell which was the faster card. If you had two PCs side-by-side, one with a 290 and the other with a 290X, you genuinely wouldn't be able to see the difference between them. In actual FPS terms all that translates to is a couple frames per second difference, at best. Most of the time it's between 5-8% slower, with just my GRID 2 benchmarks actually stretching into double figures percentage-wise. All that means in performance terms is the straight 290 is generally less than 10% slower compared with the 290X.

You're still getting the full 4GB GDDR5 frame buffer, 64 ROPs and that hefty 512-bit memory bus. All you're really missing is the 'X', some 256 Radeon cores and 16 texture units.

Moi3d radeon r290