 The fractal design Define R4 case gets featured on the WAN Show Build Logs of the Week section more than any other case. Click now to learn more about it. Welcome to my unboxing and review of one of the most anticipated graphics card launches in recent memory. This is the R9 290X from AMD. It is their new ultimate performance flagship single GPU card. It features the same GCN architecture as the last Gen 7000 series, as well as the Wii U and the PS4 and the Xbox One, but with some performance enhancements as well as some feature tweaks. So let's start with a quick rundown of the specs. The GPU core inside here is clocked at 1 GHz, which considering that it is a 6th billion transistor GPU core is nothing short of very, very impressive. It has 4 gigs of 512-bit GDDR5 memory. It's got 2,816 stream processors, so yeah, there's more performance, and its 4 gigs of GDDR5 memory are running on a 512-bit bus, meaning there is massive memory bandwidth and a ton of memory available to it, and there's a very good reason for that. It is optimized for greater than HD gaming. Compared to the last generation 7970 GHz edition, it has twice the pixel fill rate performance, almost, and nearly double the geometry performance. So that basically means it's made to take what the last gen could do, which is kind of 2.5K gaming, amp it up a notch, and deliver that kind of performance at 4K resolutions. On the front of the card, other than the upgraded industrial design, there's not much to talk about other than this right here. The fan has been significantly altered versus previous generation products, so the fan profile, the software that controls it, is able to ramp up and ramp down the speeds much more slowly, making it sound less aggressive to your ears. This ties in very nicely with their new upgraded Powertune technology. So think of it kind of like GPU Boost 2.0 for AMD. They're not really going to want me to say that, but let's face it. So it's taking four pillars, so that is voltage, clock speed, power, and temperature, and then balancing the performance of the GPU against all of those things in order to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the graphics card. Now, what AMD says is unique about their implementation is that the voltage control is incredibly granular and it can switch voltage steps in around 10 microseconds, meaning that it is always pushing to squeeze as much perf as possible out of the card. Now, Powertune comes dialed in at 95 degrees Celsius. However, some folks are not necessarily comfortable with their graphics card running at 95 degrees. It'll run at that temperature all the time because of the way it's designed. Don't worry. Powertune is fully customizable, so if you decide you have a different maximum fan speed you want or you have a different maximum temperature you want to see, it'll adjust all the other parameters, so that is clock speed, therefore performance, in order to keep in line with your expectations. Now, Nvidia ships their cards dialed in at 80 degrees by default, but it should be noted that it was only a generation or two ago that Nvidia was also saying it was fine for GPUs to run at 100 degrees. Flipping around to the top of the card, we find where the plastic shroud is joined to the metal unisync that provides cooling for the RAM and VRM components. We also find the Crossfire... No, no Crossfire connectors. AMD has tested the card. In fact, they left the contact points on the PCB so that they could actually ghetto wire one up to make sure that it doesn't make a difference, and they tested it down to PCIe 8X, two cards running in 8X, Gen 2, and saw no performance difference between putting the connectors on and not putting the connectors on, so the Crossfire connector is gone on this card. We also find the power connectors, so there's an 8-pin PCIe and a 6-pin PCIe plug, and finally, ah yes, the BIOS switch has made a return. By default, it comes with Uber and Quiet fan profiles in two separate BIOSes, and you can flip between them as you want. By default, the Quiet mode is closer to the I.O. panel, so naturally, we have gone and put it in Uber mode. On the rear I.O., we find ventilation, so this is a blower design card, so while some air is going to come out up here, most of it's going to come out the back of the card and be exhausted from your case, as well as four all-digital outputs. All digital. You might say, oh, DVI to VGA adapt- no. No adapter. The analog signaling is not there. AMD has made some other tweaks to this, though, as well, so check this out. Two DVI ports, one HDMI. Can't run iFINITY off of those three ports? Whoa, hey, now you can. You can run three 1080p monitors off DVI, DVI, and HDMI. You can still use DisplayPort for iFINITY, but it's totally up to you. In DVI monitors, no big deal. An HDMI to DVI cable will take care of that with no conversion. They've made some changes to the way that they allocate resources in order to make that possible, which is very, very cool. DisplayPort, you can also get some commercially available DisplayPort hubs now, which will allow you to easily run six displays off of this card, so there is no need for an iFINITY 6 edition card anymore. Now speaking of the HDMI port on the back, AMD was the first to implement sound over HDMI on their graphics cards a couple generations ago, and they are throwing another first status with this card. This is the second card on the market to implement AMD's true audio technology, so that is a programmable DSP that is built right onto the card that is dedicated hardware just to process audio. That means lower CPU utilization, better surround effects, less kludgy approximations of environmental effects using reverb, as well as generally more immersive sound. It does rely on support from middleware developers as well as from game developers, so given that there's only a couple cards in the market right now that support it, maybe it's not going to be a huge thing yet, but in the future, thumbs up AMD for implementing that. Flipping over to the back of the card, we've got the GPU itself, so that's clocked at up to 1 gigahertz, and then we've also got, yeah, count them, 16 memory chips, so AMD has opted to mount all of the memory on the front of the card where it can be cooled by that Unisync, and because of its 512-bit memory interface, it actually needs 16 memory modules in order to function, so there you go, guys, quite the engineering feat cramming all of that in there. While we're back here, I want to take a moment to talk about Zerocore technology, so when your computer is idling and your screen turns off, AMD cards can actually almost completely turn off the graphics card, so it uses almost no power. We've already seen this before, but just a reminder, guys, Zerocore is a thing, and it does help save power if you're not the kind of person who always puts their computer to sleep or turns it off when they're not using it. Next up, we've got Mantle, which is a potential game changer. It's going to be supported by this card and all GCN architecture cards. It is a new API that allows more direct communication between the game engine itself and the hardware inside your graphics card, rather than going through DirectX, which is an intermediary layer that doesn't allow for the same kind of bare-metal programming for an individual graphics card architecture. It's not the same as a next-gen console, even though they use a GCN architecture, but AMD is hoping that because of the similar architectures, some of the principles that developers are using to optimize on those consoles can be used through Mantle to get better performance on AMD cards. It'll rely heavily on developer support, so Battlefield 4 is going to have Mantle support coming in December, and at their developer conference in November 2013, we are expecting to see announcements from a lot of other developers, based on the rumors that I've heard chirping around. Now, before we get into performance numbers, I want to talk about overclocking. We run all of our cards overclocked, and overclocking is very different on 290X. So instead of the traditional clock speed slider and fan speed slider, now you set a maximum fan speed, and you have a little heat map grid within AMD's overdrive utility that allows you to see how the settings you're applying, and it's a percentage-based overclock now, not a clock speed-based overclock, affect both the clock speed as well as the temperature and the power targets and how all of those things work together. So you're going to want to spend a little bit of time learning about that before you go and try and overclock this card. Now for us, we were running in Uber mode. We ran at 1080p, and then we did a special head-to-head battle between R9 290X and GTX 780 at 2.5K. However, we don't have a 4K monitor at this time, and AMD informs me that the 290X doesn't really stretch its legs and show its metal until you hook it up to a 4K display. Without further ado, off to you, Slick. There has been a ton of anticipation over these numbers, so I'm just going to go right into it. And something that a lot of people are going to notice right off the bat is that this card is not actually topping our charts. To explain, we have been running our graphics card tests for quite a while now with everything overclocked to the wall, and this test is no different. We're running everything overclocked as much as possible, and we found that the 290X actually comes out of the box quite aggressively clocked, and there isn't a ton of headroom left. Now we were interested when it started not being at the top of all our charts, so I did a little bit of investigation, and when the 780 and 290X are both at stock, the 290X and the 780 often switch position. The 290X is actually usually on top. But we run all of our tests overclocked, so moving on. Another thing to note is that this card is about $550, and a 780 is about $650. Maybe give a few more depending on where you are. Now at about 20% cheaper in our 1080p benchmarks, it's only 10% slower. Jumping to 2560 by 1440p, we noticed actually that the story got even sweeter. At about only 5% loss in performance, that makes that whole price per performance thing even better. We were seeing 10% on 1080p, and now we're only seeing 5%. That's great. Moving up to 4K, it's supposed to be even better. We unfortunately don't have those numbers as we don't have a screen that can support that though. Another thing to note is that with Star Citizen, everything is kind of skewed. That game is not released yet, that game is not optimized yet, and I kind of think it's going to happen, but Mantle is not on it yet at all. So those three things will actually change the game a ton. We just wanted to include it because Star Citizen. No actual real logical reason, we just wanted to show how it's performing right now just in case you're one of those guys that's going to jump on the hangar module, that's going to jump on dogfighting, that's going to jump on everything in the future because you're a big follower of Star Citizen, and we know there's a ton of you out there. If you liked the video, like the video. If you disliked the video, dislike the video. And in the comments below, what are you going for? Are you going for that sensible price per performance route, or are you going for the hardcore I want to be at the top of the charts with crazy amounts of overclocking and all that kind of stuff angle? What is your angle? And as always, be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.