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It must be said that the plastics of both the 290 and 290X do fall short of matching the premium metal finish of Nvidia's 7xx series - and still somehow manage to weigh in at a heftier 0.95kg, as compared to the 0.87kg of Nvidia's GTX 780 Ti. Connectivity remains on par too, featuring two DVI-D ports, a single DisplayPort and a HDMI connection lining the end bracket. Each is also punctuated with a single 75mm radial fan to direct airflow. Here we have two dual-slot cards of matching lengths using simple matte plastics for the bulk of their casing. With the spec differences being relatively minor given the sharp drop in price, it's a surprise to find the 290X's build quality, connections and approach to cooling go untouched in the transition to the 290. This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. For AMD's plucky 290 to come even close to these contenders would be a remarkable feat indeed. It also massively undercuts Nvidia rivals such as the GTX 780 and 780 Ti despite bearing competitive specs, and comes in at 40 per cent of the GTX Titan's current price of £760. At the time of writing the R9 290 can be found for as little as £299, as compared to the approximate going rate of £420 for the elder 290X.
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Remarkably, all other specs remain in place between AMD's two new Hawaii chipset cards - but the biggest difference is in pricing. The R9 290 is about £100 cheaper and the cutbacks are minor: the maximum clock speed is downgraded by five per cent, stream processors are chopped back to 2560 and the active compute unit count decreased to 160.Īnd that's your lot.
#AMD RADEON R9 290 PLUS#
This is a muscular card that gives us the first flash of AMD's new Hawaii XT chipset, built through a 28-nanometre manufacturing process - with support for the company's own Mantle API, DirectX 11.2, plus the on-board TrueAudio sound processing chip previously seen in the 260X. Taking charge at the top of the Volcanic Islands line to succeed the Sea Islands series, we have the R9 290X. For the cheaper 290 variant, cutbacks are made in alternative areas: it takes the 1000MHz maximum core clock of the 290X down to 947MHz, active compute units from 176 to 160, while stream processors get chopped from 2816 to a still respectable count of 2560. It's a number that sounds excessive on paper, but any games operating at 2560x1440 and beyond with a lick of MSAA will soon see this statistic put to practical use. This opens the floodgates to some blazing fast access speeds to its 4GB pool of 5GHz RAM, the result being an overall fill-rate of 320GB/s for each card.
#AMD RADEON R9 290 FULL#
In amongst support for the pending Mantle API, a unique on-chip TrueAudio sound processing technology makes the cut, plus an ambitious push for gaming at full 4K resolution.Īt over £400 this is a wee bit on the dear side for many, but fortunately we now have a cut-down edition of the card in our hands as well: the R9 290, With a mind to achieve a more agreeable circa £300 price-tag, concessions are made to its specs in all the right places - all while still producing competitive results compared to Nvidia's very best.Īs part of this eager push for 4K gaming, both the R9 290 and 290X offer up the widest memory buses of any AMD card ever released, counting in at a remarkable 512-bit. And unlike the 260X and 270X cards released earlier this year, which were simple rebrands of the existing HD 77 GPUs respectively, this is the company's most forward-thinking entry in the series yet. So I'm honestly not sure, maybe it's not specifically the graphics card causing the problem? Maybe something else is affecting it? It's really hard to troubleshoot.Forged with its latest GCN 1.1 architecture at centre, the AMD R9 290X sports a cutting edge Hawaii XT chipset that sets out to better Nvidia's cards - right up to the mighty GTX Titan - for a considerable discount. So when I load up the SteamVR test, I am stuck on a 'LOADING' screen for like a few minutes, then the test will run great fps and everything, but at the end I get these terrible results. If I wait like 10 mins on the black screen it will actually eventually load the game, but I'd rather not have to wait 10 minutes each time I wanna play. If I CTRL+ALT+DEL it switches the game to windowed mode and I can see/play it fine, but when I try to switch back to fullscreen it just messes everything up. when I start up Rainbow Six Vegas I get the initial Uplay loading screen then my screen goes black as if it was going to fullscreen, except it just stays black and nothing happens. There is a problem when I try to load up games. In terms of game performance, it's strange because all my games run very well, no framerate issues or anything. If it's not a 290 it could be a 280 but I'm sure it's a 290. Ok, I'll look into these options and let you know how I get on.