R9 290X CF vs GTX 980

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hirajhil

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Jun 3, 2013
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Hi, I already havr Sapphire Tri-X OC R9 290X 4GB card. I am planning to increase the capability. My budget is around 350. I am considering two options, adding another sapphire R9 290X in cross fire, or selling my existing R9 290X and buy a single GTX 980 card. What you recommend. I am not a fanboy of any card, and Geforce exclusive features TXAA, Physx are not issues for me. I need better gameplay and I play at 1440p in a 32 inch single monitor with refresh rate max 60. My processor is pretty decent, Xeon E3 1245 V3, and 16GB DDR3 Ram. So they should not be a bottleneck in running latest games.
 
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Gam3r01
At your resolution the Xfire setup would be ~30% faster than the single 980.

In terms of raw performance the 290x Xfire is better, however it draws more power, produces much more heat, and has little to no upgrade path.
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Think you would come short with money selling the card you have, because it's used you are not going to get the money you paid for it. But if you did have enough money I would go for a GTX 980 .

I would also be curious to see benchmarks from a R9 290X 4GB crossfire , and compare that to a GTX 980 benchmarks . If there is a favorite game you got and one dose better than the other in benchmarks then that would also influence my decision.
 
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I am not concerned about power and heat. And Sapphire version of the card is kind of low noise. What did you mean by little to no upgrade path?

 
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Even though I would highly recommend the Gtx 980 as a better investment in the long run, for your specific set up I would have to agree that Xfiring another 290x would be a more efficient and optimal option for your scenario. But be warned as many people have stated you won't have the ability to upgrade much further. Hope this helps.
 
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Keep in mind that Crossfire and SLI can be fun to mess with if you enjoy maybe a third or more of your “Gaming” time messing with and reading up on drivers and bugs. Many games just do not work with or use more than one GPU and the ones that do can be troublesome. Your frame rate will go up but by varying amounts and may add bugs and pausing and glitches. If you can control yourself, save up for the fastest single GPU card you can afford.
 
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290x CF is for 4k system only. Anything else below 4k, just go with a single 980GTX.

If you have already one 290x, then I think CF is a better option if you have at least a 900W power supply... 1000W preferably.

If your specs are accurate, I see you have a 1000W power supply, just go for the second 290x. You will be 4k ready and barely 20% behind two 980GTX in SLI at 4k.
 
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That's false, the support for SLI and CF is not an issue anymore for quite a while. As a multi-GPU user for the last 7 years, I will simply say that whatever drawback never match the benefit of running dual GPUs.
 
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Depends if you have OC cards already. My two Power Color PCS+ match game benchs and surpass the 295x by a margin.

 
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Well I’ve been using multiple GPUs since (1997? God Im old.) it was first possible with 3dfx Voodoo cards and to say “is not an issue anymore for quite a while” is a not all the case. It’s very game specific. If you just play one or two games that fully support it great but if not, it’s gots issues. There are modern game engines that do not even support dual GPUs and many games devs that simply don’t implement dual GPU sport. If anything the last few years with console ports making up more and more of the games we play on the PC its worse than ever. Then you have some games that run ok with both GPUs running and little to no bump in frame rates and your GPU usage bouncing around in the low 30-40s and your just burning electricity and generating heat.

Best case, you spend twice as much for the second card, more for a better power supply, more for a better mother board, maybe more for better cooling and more for electricity and then only a few special games get a 50%-75% boost in performance, on paper. You can’t just install FRAPS and go: See I get way more FPS now. There are bugs and spikes in frame rates and more than a few cases where your game will slow down more than if you had a single GPU and or just not be as smooth. Until dual GPUs are transparent to the system, something like hardware RAID for hard drives, there will be issues.

I admit, it’s hard to resist buying that second card and some go for 3 or 4 cards and that is way past the point of diminishing returns. Just be realistic about it. If you can wait it out, the next years or the one after’s single GPU card will give you way more bang for the buck and you'll be running a cooler, quitter, more efficient system and every game you play will be using the full abilities of the card you paid for.

 
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Negative. I sold my crossfire 280x setup because of heat/noise/driver issues. Get a single 980 or 290x or wait for the the next gen'. Im sorry AMD has not fixed driver issues on those cards in my experience. RockING AMD for the last 2 generations and they make good products, fine, not a fan boy or anything. however crossfire is not well optimized. Tek syndicate did a very thorough video on 280x crossfire that describes several driver and microstutter problems common with that setup. I'm in the process of selling my last 280x and getting an nvidia card this time. Also 300-400 for a used AMD card is nuts. I bought one of mine used for 200 and I sold both of mine for around $180. You need to shop around D Internet more
 
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