 Buy an Intel NUC barebones PC and get a limited edition t-shirt and in-game items for Planet Side 2. Click now to learn more. Now I have to admit, I feel like AMD was trolling us reviewers a little bit with the release of the 290X and the 290. And I guess I've been trolling you guys a little bit lately with unboxings that don't have boxes in them. So I am going to rectify that by showing you the box that the Radeon R9 290 came in, unboxing the card and then proceeding to get on with the review of the card. Which for something like this, where quite frankly that's what you should do with the box, then install it in your system and enjoy it, enjoy the gaming bliss that comes with it is probably what you should do as well. Now what do I mean by trolling us? Well, I mean the card works and it's great. That's all fine and good. But what AMD did is they released two cards that are pretty much the same thing, days apart so that we get to make separate videos outlining pretty much the same information twice in a row. So if you guys have watched the 290X video, you probably already know most of what I'm about to say. So go ahead and skip forward to the performance numbers, which are where this card is really going to prove its worth. Price to performance, my friends. So without further ado, it uses the same GCN architecture as the previous edition 7000 series as well as the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4, meaning that AMD's, ah yes, their API called Mantle is going to be able to borrow a lot of the development principles that go into making console games and bring them to the PC. So a more bare to metal programming approach that should give AMD's cards when they're running the Mantle API and the game has to specifically support it, the first one's going to be Battlefield 4, a huge performance advantage. It's got over 6 billion transistors and unlike the 290X, it is clocked at only 947 megahertz maximum versus 1 gigahertz for the 290X and it has its stream processors cut down a little bit too. So it has 2,560 stream processors. Other than that, it is pretty much the same card. It has 4 gigs of RAM running on a 512 bit bus. So these cards are designed for high resolution gaming. That is to say 2.5K or 4K or you might as well go for something like a 280X unless you really want to crank up the anti-aliasing completely through the roof or be ready for you know, next generation games at 1080p. It's not designed for 1080p my friends. It has a newer optimized fan profile but that doesn't change the fact that it is a little bit on the louder side. The good news is that when it ramps up and ramps down, it does so much more smoothly than their previous generation fan controller design. It has their new updated power tune technology that factors in the GPU clock, the voltage, the temperature and the power consumption in order to give you as much performance as possible out of the card at any given time. Now this changes the way overclocking works. So they have a new graphical user interface for overclocking where basically instead of overclocking to a frequency, now you overclock based on a percentage and you give the card thresholds within which to work where you say okay, I'm okay with this much more than the recommended power and I'm okay with this much more than the recommended clock speed. Do your best and then the card will deliver to you whatever it can. Although our 290X review revealed that there wasn't much overclocking headroom on that card, maybe we find out that things are a little bit different here. Speaking of not much overclocking headroom, they come dialed in at 95 degrees. Don't be surprised when your 290 or 290X runs at 95 degrees Celsius under load. This is by design. AMD is switching voltages and clock speeds about every 10 microseconds in order to squeeze as much performance out of the card as possible. If you don't like it, just like NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0 technology, just turn it down. Just use the slider, say okay, I'm only comfortable with 80 degrees. AMD is saying it's not going to affect the longevity of the card. They probably know better than us, but hey, who knows? Heat does make integrated circuits die eventually. So there you go, whatever you're comfortable with, dial it in at that. It'll just turn down the performance of the card a little bit or you can choose to ramp up the fan speed a little bit more if you want. Speaking of fan speed, there's quiet mode and uber mode. So there's a switch on the top of the card towards the back of the card towards the fan is uber mode. That is what we use for our testing. What you also might have noticed looking close up at the card right there is there are no crossfire connectors. All the crossfire communication is done through that PCI Express 16X interface down there at the bottom. It's PCIe 3.0 ready, but don't worry, even if you're running PCIe 2.0, 8X slots, AMD hasn't observed any performance difference between running connectors and not running connectors. So the rest of the card physically, this is fascinating here at the back two DVI ports, HDMI and display port, no analog output whatsoever, not even with adapters. But what's cool is you can run iFINITY using any of these three ports now and up to six displays using a display port hub off of a single card without needing a specific fancy special iFINITY 6 edition card. It takes one six pin and one eight pin power connector and it has a pretty sexy looking shroud overall. There's not much to see on the back of the card because all of the memory chips are actually soldered on the front of the card, a bit of an unusual design for something that has 16 memory chips on it, which is a requirement if you're going to have a 512 bit memory bus because it actually reads and writes to every one of those chips all at the same time. And that's how you're able to achieve the massive bandwidth that AMD has with this particular graphics card. So they've also got true audio built into this card, the 260X and the 290X. That is a dedicated onboard digital sound processor that will allow games to leverage it if they take advantage of it. There's middlewares that are going to support it. It's really going to depend on dev support. And right now there's only three cards that actually have true audio hardware on them. So it might not be as relevant for now, but in the future it will be a less kludgy and more CPU resource efficient way to implement much, much better audio that's more immersive in games. And I appreciate AMD being a pioneer in the whole graphics card audio thing. I mean, they were the first ones to put audio over HDMI on a graphics card way back in the day as well. Another note on Mantle, guys, is much like true audio, it depends on developer support. So Mantle can potentially dramatically improve the performance not only of this card, but also 7000 series cards, but we've yet to see a game engine that actually implements it yet. Once it's done, it might be as simple as for end users automatically detecting your AMD GCN graphics card or even just being a drop down and giving you like huge performance improvements. But until we actually see anything, it's really, really hard for us to say. Now I'm going to hand off to Luke to give you guys the performance numbers before we start. I cannot emphasize this enough. Please listen to me. We run all of our graphics cards overclocked. That is why our numbers are different from other reviewers. I hope that was clear enough. If you have any curiosities about the kinds of overclocks that were running on the cards, we will link our overclocking master sheet under the video so you can see exactly what clock speeds were at. Our 290X wasn't a particularly great overclocker in our 290X review. It wasn't that bad either. I mean, it was functional. It did overclock a little bit. It wasn't as bad as our old 7870. But we had people saying that we were putting it up against the GTX 780 Lightning. We weren't. That was just a standard GTX 780 reference card that wasn't a particularly great overclocker. We're looking into ways we can tweak this methodology, maybe using something like average overclocks on hardware bought on every card or something along those lines. But the cold hard truth is we are not changing the way we run overclocked cards because we feel that it is the one thing that we can do a little bit differently here versus everyone else who is running the card stock. If your complaint is everyone else runs the card stock, why are your numbers different? Why are you even looking at our numbers if you know they're not going to be different? If you want to see stock benchmarks, go to any one of the literally 100 to 200 other review sites that run them and go look at them there. Without further ado, here's Slick. So the first thing you're going to notice is that the R9 290 did really well, like really, really well, like better than 290X well. And a little bit more research into this topic brought up that what likely happened was I got a not super great overclocker for my 290X and a really, really good overclocker for my 290. How we're going to address this in the future is we're going to continue to have me overclock the cards as hard as I can right when I first get them, because we don't have any averages and we don't know how well they overclock immediately. So on the launch video, it'll be as hard as I can get it for overclocked. And then after that, we're going to go with hardware bought averages. So in the future, after a bunch of people have gotten the card and after a bunch of people have submitted averages to hardware bought, we will actually be adjusting our cards to that. In the past, we had kept it with the launch overclock to make it consistent throughout all of our testing. But we believe that going with the hardware bought averages will be more representative of what the average consumer will get in the field. So what are your takeaways knowing that we're going to start rebalancing for hardware bought and knowing that we're going to swap out the 290X for one that can overclock a little bit closer to hardware bought levels in the future than QASU. So we're going to be getting an aftermarket one from them. I don't know when we're in line for it. So that'll be good. The 290 is extremely hot. It's extremely loud. It consumes a very large amount of power and it crushes benchmarks. If you can deal with the power consumption, if you can deal with the heat, if you can deal with the sound, it's a really powerful card at a really good price point. And that's just something people are going to want to deal with. It's pulling more power in a lot of situations than a 480. For those of you guys that remember 480s, that is pretty insane. But this thing is very powerful for its price. If you have a high price point and you want to purchase the king of this generation, you have a little bit of waiting left to do. Mantle and 780ti are still yet to flex their muscles and we're not sure exactly how this battle is going to play out. But if you're looking at around a $400 graphics card, it might be decision time. Now if you like the video, like the video. If you dislike the video, dislike the video. And in the comments below, what's your trade off? Are you going for really heavy, crazy performance but taking in power consumption, heat, and sound? Or are you going for the more all around comfortable experience with maybe a little bit less performance? Leave that in the comments below and as always, please subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.