 Buy an unlocked Intel 4th Gen Core i7 or Core i5 processor and get a free copy of Rome 2 Total War. Click now to learn more. The AMD Radeon R9 290 went at launch to turn the graphics card market pretty much on its ear by delivering performance competitive with the then $700 plus GTX 780 at $400. There were some issues, however. Powertune is AMD's technology that balances power consumption, clock speed, temperature, and fan speed. So while the card is advertised to run at up to 947 MHz, it and its big brother the 290X often runs into thermal limits, causing clock speeds and voltage to scale down so they don't actually run at the speeds on the box in games. This throttling behavior could be blamed on a couple of things. One of them is the high heat output of the Hawaii GPU with its massive 6 billion transistors. The other is the lackluster reference cooler with its loud fan that forces end users to choose between hairdryer-like noise or throttle performance. Now, whatever you want to blame it on, there were a few things that were very clear. Number one is that the R9 290 already performed very well against the GTX 780, which prompted Nvidia to drop prices, only down to $500, mind you, but it was a drop. Number two is that we won't have a clear idea of what the card is truly capable of until we get better coolers in the form of TwinFrozer or DirectCU2-class coolers from guys like MSI and ASUS. Even with custom air cooling, though, we'd have no way to know for sure whether any thermal throttling was occurring. We've observed both good and bad things about Nvidia's GPU Boost 2.0, which is similar to AMD's Powertune. A good thing about it is that, unlike AMD, they provide a base clock, so you'll have a reference point for the minimum performance you'll be getting if you buy the card. One bad thing we've noticed, however, is that while GPU Boost 2.0 provides end user customization and allows you to change your thermal limit manually, for example, from 80 degrees to 95 degrees, it seems to be actually just doing whatever it wants in the background. So... yeah, you can change it, but it's just throttling anyway. So we wanted to remove all possibility of thermal throttling and liquid cool the cards. Fortunately, we contacted Coolantz, who hooked us up not only with a water block that fits on either the R9 290 or the 290X, you can check the link in the video description for pricing and availability of the gear we used in this video, but also a GTX 780 block, a pump, a reservoir, and some awesome, awesome quick disconnect fittings that let us do very fast graphics card swaps on our first ever liquid-cooled test bench. In fact, guys, I just disconnected a tube here that's completely full of water, and we got no leakage whatsoever. Alright, moving on to the test. We used the Maximus V formula with a 3770K at 3.9 GHz, 8 gigs of DDR3 memory at 1600 MHz, and a PC power and cooling 1200-watt power supply. As always, our graphics cards were overclocked as high as they could go on both air and water, and we used two separate liquid cooling loops for the CPU and for the graphics card, so we could isolate the heat generated by the GPU, so we could remove variables when evaluating them in terms of their thermal performance. If you guys want to see the clock speeds we were running at on the graphics cards, there will be a link to our chart in the video description below. Our results surprised us a lot. We were, like everyone on the entire internet, expecting the R9 290 to overclock like a beast and destroy the 780, out of which we were expecting only a mild performance improvement. Now, because we traditionally set our 780 to 95 degrees on the thermal limit for an apples-to-apples comparison against AMD cards, and it only ever runs at 80 degrees, we assumed that there was no additional headroom to unlock with better cooling, because we were never hitting our user-defined thermal limits. But, it turns out that for liquid cooling enthusiasts, Nvidia's monkey business with the user-adjustable thermal limits turns into some pretty good performance gains for that card when it's running underwater as well. So first up is thermal performance. Both cards ran between 35 to 45 degrees Celsius under load, with the 780 being closer to 35 and the 290 being closer to 45. When it comes to gaming performance, we only really tested a couple games, because what we were looking for in this video was performance scaling from air to water. So a huge library of games wasn't really necessary. What we found is that the max overclocked performance of the GTX 780 improved by just under 10%, and the max overclocked performance of the R9 290 improved by about 7%. That means that, basically, when you're out there shopping and deciding between these two cards with the intention of going water, you can basically look at any performance comparison chart and factor in another 5 to 10% for each when you're doing your value analysis. On the subject of value and performance, this video is a great example of why I don't talk about pricing for products in my videos. The R9 290 launched at $400, which would have made it a clear winner against the $500 GTX 780 in this particular showdown. But it now costs $500 too, making it exactly the same price, but with higher power consumption and higher heat output. So, for the gamers out there, the GTX 780 gets the nod from me at the moment, but there are things other than games, and AMD's cards are well known to perform incredibly well against their Nvidia counterparts in some compute applications, one example of which being cryptocurrency mining. And folks are buying up AMD graphics cards by the truckload for Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, and that's been causing some serious changes to the retail pricing, as I outlined before. So, ultimately, it'll be up to you, the viewer, to look at the performance numbers, then check out the values that we're showing you in terms of what you can expect when overclocking, then check out the links to the cards in the video description and do the value calculation for yourself. If you're curious, guys, you can see the overclocked values for our graphics cards in the Google Doc linked in the video description. Remember that overclocking is always a crap shoot, and you may get a card that overclocks better than ours, you may get one that overclocks worse than ours, and there's no guarantee for any of that stuff. So, anyways, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video on the removal of thermal limits from the R9 290 and the GTX 780. Let us know in the comments if the results surprised you or if they were what you expected. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it, and always, wow, it's doing really good up till there. As always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.