The Cause Of And Fix For Radeon R9 290X And 290 Inconsistency

Page 6 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.


The problem just the cooler, right..?
Like others said, wait for 3rd party card with decent cooler..

Thanks to AMD for make this graphics card, and make the price competitive again..
 
Ha.. Thanks for the nvidia price drops, pls keep that loud hot card to yourselves. lol, but in all seriousness for the consumers out there who look for value, even with these issues these cards are still good. Just spend the money saved (by not buying a gtx780) on watercooling. End result is a faster cooler looking rig for about the same price.
 


I can see people buying the reference cards for the GTX 780 Ti.
Just for how pretty that cooler is, not to mention its a way better blower design that most cards use.

Like Maxx said, blowers are usually better in some multi GPU configurations. Given they have enough airflow to EACH card.
 
There's still variances and inconsistencies with the press and retail cards, its still leaves you with thinking something ain't right with these cards given to the reviewers and what you get retail.
 
in line with what other people are saying, An aftermarket cooler will be a much better option to go with for most cards. What i do not understand is why Nvidia and AMD are still designing these horrible Reference cooler setups. With all the in house development power they have you would figure they could put some time into creating a better reference design to begin with beyond the GPU and board setup. with Nvidia i understand that it has always used the power of the Manufacturers to tweak the design but ATI/AMD used to produce their own cards and should have a greater understanding and respect for providing a more adequate cooling design as a refrence
 




mr monsta!!! are you british!? the 3 perecent variance had been announced by AMD on the press conference day, there is no issue now...:lol:
 


yeah you stay away from it, seriously...I have the card running in my chassis, it's a beast, it is silent unlike what others try to imply, I didn't face the above mentioned problem,,,, it was a simple driver problem, the driver was about RPM tuning to set fan speeds rather than PWM manipulation, now if you like to babble on about its running hot etc, to justify your purchase, that's something else... :bounce:!!!
 
What will happen when further on the card will start shipping with the kind of assemble and quality control I got from my 7970 Sapphire card(very rough heatsink machine finish and so much TIM that it flowed over the entire gpu package - it was a pain to clean - I have pics if anyone is interested)?
Will the cards stay constantly at the lowest clocks and give you 280X like performance(am I the only one who thinks the retail Asus 290X card before the fix was not much faster than a 280X which in turn is like a 7970 - a two year old card)? That's bad!
I would also don't like the way they're going with the temperatures and power consumption of the latest cards. When I start a game on my 7970 which isn't really a top card anymore my room temperature goes up 2 -3C in minutes which is fine now but in the summer if I don't run the AC constantly I start approaching 35C, thats not a very nice ambient to be in not to mention the noise from all the fans starts to become noticable. I can only fear what will happen if I upgrade (not likely).
Having a card that runs faster in lower temperatures is like having a card that makes 200HP in Alaska but only 150HP in Florida.
Sorry for rant....
 
So all of this is about variations in quiet mode?
That's it? Really? You're kidding right?

It was lame of you to test in quiet mode in the first place.

We want to know how the card performs maxed out ball to the walls1

We are not concerned about your sensitive ears.

I have my components inside a case.

Sound levels drop by half as the distance is doubled so at a normal seating distance these cards are fine.

I for one am not drinking the Koolaid.
 
Hey Chris, thank you for the writeup. It brings up some interesting questions. Can you look into a few more details? Can you check and post the stock voltage along with the ASIC quality of each card? In addition, would you be willing to replace the thermal paste of each card and then rerunning the benchmarks in addition to providing pictures of the contact surface of each card?

Considering that there is still high variance between the two aftermarket cards after the fan calibration patch, with Asus being far inferior to Sapphire, there may be build quality concerns. For example, here are a couple images of 290X cooler, as you can see the build quality is lacking:

4fab7f9a_WP_20131106_001.jpeg

98f26e04_dUIyQ0pS.jpeg
 


Hi, don't worry about anything the problem was only about r9-290x and r9-290 reference cards, and it is fixed right now, I have the card now, it's a beast, mine did not have the problem, but even if some one's card had the problem, he/she would download the latest driver from www.AMD.com and everything will be fine, as if the problem didnt exist at all
 

chris wont answer your question, the variance between cards is 3% which is quite natural, and AMD had mentioned this antecidentally, and it is not a big problem, anyhow the problem is solved by simply changing the fan's RPM via a driver by AMD... get one and enjoy, if you are concerned though, wait for AMD's partners to relase this card with their own thermal soloutions, I have r9-290, it is a savage beast....

 


I believe the 7970 was also slightly concave in the middle. As a result a shim is needed before a closed loop CPU cooler like the kuhler 620 (also slightly concave) is attached to the GPU chip for cooling in the RedMod. Some of the lesser AMD boards like the 6870 used GPUs that weren't concave.and a closed loop CPU cooler could be attached without a shim.

My only guess is that it keeps the paste centered in the middle better for the manufacturers non-reference GPU coolers. Maybe someone more knowledgeable than myself could explain it better

Do a google search for Red Mod GPU cooling to find out more. . The posters on the Red mod site are chomping at the bit to get their early order cards and work their magic attaching CPU closed loop coolers to these to unlock their full potential with low temps and eliminate the excessive noise from the crappy little fan in the reference card.

 

MSI N780 LIGHTNING for $515 is a better buy 😉



But that isn't the concern. My concern is with the deterioration of quality amongst the AIB partners over the last year and half and analysis of production quality of the various manufacturers would be nice to have for comparison between models :)


PC Perspective also took a look at performance of the 290 with new v9.2 drivers:


fanspeedv9.png

clockspeedv9.png

Crysis3_2560x1440_OFPS.png

soundv9.png



Stock core voltages have a direct impact on temperatures and would be the largest variable in performance at any given fan speed, the next potential factor is the thermal paste application and the heatsink quality.


Of course all of this was propagated down from Nvidia, Chris was just the mouthpiece:

10765209534_05e94e56ef_z.jpg

 
I'm an AMD supporter (not really a fan) but i really think this was just a stupid move from them that they didn't even put a half decent cooler on their reference cards. GCN 1.0 was a nice architecture with all the goods and bads in it. Hawaii deserved a more positive launch than this. This is AMD's way of wrapping their diamond with a piece of sh*t
 
Fantastic investigative journalism by Chris and Tom's Hardware team. It's reassuring that we do not let any 'mistakes' by the manufacturers slip through by asking tough questions when necessary. My opinion is that AMD really dropped the ball with this launch. Observing the press sample does much better than the two retail cards at same fan speed is a cause for concern.
 


I bought reference versions of my HD6970's because water blocks for reference cards are generally much easier to find.
 


I know what you mean. It doesn't make sense, but my DCuII 770 idles at 25ºC and never goes above 65ºC. Has that 770 version well beat.

I'm just stuck to ASUS that's kinda why. Lol
 
AMD did this out of desperation to take the lead from nVIDIA, and in the hopes that you, the buyer, was as dumb as they hoped you'd be. Their own kick in the teeth comes in the form of the 290 making the 290X obsolete with it's $150 price difference with equal performance.

My last 5 cards have been AMD, but that doesn't make me blind to the truth.

This was a good read, Tom's. Thank you... we should all thank you.

 
Eh... while I still had the reference cooler on mine, it seemed to perform as well as, if not better than, most of the press boards, ambient temps near 80F. Mind, I had tweaked it to an 85C temp limit and a 60% fan limit, but it almost never went over about 45% in GPU-Z, let alone drop clocks... not that I was exactly running Furmark on it... only really Batman and 3DMark.

Now, though, I've got an Accelero Xtreme III strapped to it. Can't even get the GPU temp much above 60 now, though I've limited my overclock to 10%... the VRM's can still get up to about 90C before stabilizing and I really don't want to push them any harder.
 




you are a part of this show, 5 AMD cards!!!? really?!? you do not have even 1, desperately bla bla...get out of here dude... there was a slight problem with the fan RPM and now it is fixed, well tell you what, you are blind, you didn't even bother yourself to read the article, '' AMD was desperate 🙁, Nvidia is good performa, please buy Nvideo 🙁 please please...'' dude I own an r9-290 and this 400$ monster nukes gtx 780, ...''Blinda ganepora nvideo please 🙁 '' AMD did an excellent job nuking Nvidia's *** , the problem was a slender one, which was defined in the software/ driver, it is solved, now everything is fine, if you didn't understand this after reading this article ok read this one http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/170636-well-that-was-quick-amd-solves-r9-290-throttling-problem-with-a-new-driver , if you still can't understand, don't blame others, you are dumb
 
who cares why , this sound to me like an excuse from amd side, for the price is a great card , but overall is rubish , way to hot and way to much perf variance, and as all ppl complain a lot of noise . For now i wills stick to my 7970 and w8 to see if any aftermarket design gets beter in term of stability and noise , if not , il just ad a 2nd 7970 for 200 pounds and the performance will be waaaaaaay beter than any other card for a small price. IF i would have to buy a new vga in that price range i will definitely choose 7990
 


^And this is why I'm not a fanboy.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom