**Linus Tech Tips: EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition Review**

The EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition is a beast of a graphics card that has been eagerly anticipated by enthusiasts for its performance and overclocking capabilities. In this review, we'll delve into the details of this impressive GPU and see if it lives up to the hype.

One of the standout features of the GTX 290X is its robust cooling system. The card comes equipped with an LN2 mode that allows users to push the card to extreme temperatures, but also carries a risk of bricking the card if not used properly. This feature was tested in our lab, and we were pleased to find that it added a significant amount of stability to the card, allowing us to reach higher core clock speeds than ever before.

Another notable feature of the GTX 290X is its backplate, which features an LED indicator that shows the card's load level. However, once we overclocked the card, the LED remained red, indicating that it was operating at maximum capacity. This is a testament to the card's ability to handle high loads and temperatures.

The card itself is extremely heavy, with a massive aluminum heat sink that takes up three slots in our system. While this may seem excessive, it's clear that EVGA has prioritized performance over aesthetics in the design of this GPU.

One of the most interesting aspects of the GTX 290X is its potential for watercooling. By removing the coolers and installing water blocks, enthusiasts can create a stunningly clean and highly efficient system that would be perfect for overclocking. This is an area that we'll explore further in our benchmarking section.

**Benchmarking the EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition**

To put the GTX 290X through its paces, we set up a system with a 3960X CPU clocked at 4.0 GHz, 1866 MHz RAM, and of course, the EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition. We'll be using our custom overclocking dock to adjust the card's settings, and will also be comparing its performance to the popular Kingpin classified 780 Ti.

Our benchmarking results are in, and we're pleased to report that the GTX 290X performed admirably, if not exactly as expected. While it didn't quite reach the level of our 780 Ti, it still managed to deliver impressive performance across a wide range of games and applications. We were also impressed by the card's ability to maintain stability at high loads, thanks in no small part to its LN2 mode.

One of the most interesting aspects of our benchmarking results is how they compare to our expectations. While we did expect the GTX 290X to perform well, it's clear that this GPU has some serious chops under the hood. Whether you're a seasoned enthusiast or just looking for a reliable system, the EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition is definitely worth considering.

**Conclusion**

The EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition is a powerhouse of a graphics card that offers unparalleled performance and overclocking capabilities. With its robust cooling system, stunning backplate, and potential for watercooling, this GPU is sure to appeal to enthusiasts who want the best of the best. While it may carry a higher price tag than some of its competitors, we believe that the GTX 290X is well worth the investment.

If you're in the market for a new graphics card, we highly recommend considering the EVGA GeForce GTX 290X Lightning Edition. With its impressive performance, overclocking capabilities, and robust cooling system, this GPU is sure to deliver years of service and excitement for enthusiasts alike.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis card features a Hawaii XT core with 2,816 stream processors clocked at 1.08 gigahertz boost clock 4 gigs of gddr5 memory on a 512 bit bus and all that's clocked at 5 GHz as well but spoiler alert that's not actually the interesting thing about this product the R9 290x lightning from MSI is the fastest hands down R9 29x card we have ever tested and really it it feels like unlocks the potential of amd's latest and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen yet with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts now it's not as simple as I mean I know that sounds great but it's not as simple as just okay well everyone should just get R9 290x lightning cards because it's 150 bucks more than a base R9 290x and even $100 more than msi's pretty strong gaming card that has you know a dual fan cooler and some of that aftermarket stuff that we like to see so like what do you actually get for your extra $100 well for one thing MSI has moved beyond the dual fan twin frozer cooler design to what they're calling the fry frozer and while I'm not necessarily convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones um what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is pwm and can be individually controlled in software so you could actually run how whichever ones you want however fast you want so you can be like okay well I want the the 86 mm ones on the outside to run faster and the 7mm one I'm going to ramp that one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up they can tend to get a little bit whiny and loud so you can actually control that however you want to um now okay so before we get into some of the other special stuff it does support the usual AMD technology so Crossfire up to four-way although you'll need to water cool it if you want to do that EK does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a triple slot design out of the box you've got support for AMD mantle uh true audio powertune which is their Dynamic uh clock speed ramping up and ramping down to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power you've got easy Affinity with no display port monitor required so you could run three monitors off of two DVI ports in an HDMI port which is really cool or even up to six displays if you use a display port Hub and then of course it's got a 4 gig frame buffer like all r9290 X's for a better 4K gaming experience it also has some unusual stuff so in the extremely sexy folding box that actually has like a drawer at the bottom for the access accessories along with the usual like you know stickers and Driver disc and manual and all that stuff is a certificate of stability adapters for using a multimeter to check voltages and a replacement vrm heat sink for subzero cooling now the card itself is designed with Subzero in mind it uses a completely non-reference PCB with a 12 plus three-phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three pcie connectors two eight pins and one six pin something that that power hungry GPU core in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed it's got an ln2 bio switch which is something that manufacturers tell us isn't necessary if you're not going Subzero but this is two cards in a row now that we've run into weird throttling issues on the first one was the Kingpin classified 780 Ti from EVGA that was immediately fixed by enabling ln2 mode and then once ln2 mode was on remember you turn it off flip the switch cuz you're loading a new bios and then reboot it the card was a dream to overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all so also on the top of the card we have an LED indicator to show the card's load so in theory um the lightning logo is green for no load blue for medium and red for a heavy load but in practice uh once we overclocked it it just kind of stayed red because we were pushing it pretty pretty hard and then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time I did mention that that cooler takes up three slots but I can see why they did it unlike some three slot coolers I've seen before almost the entire top of the card is basically a solid like grid of aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that so in terms of the sheer Mass the card is extremely heavy so it's not like they just made it thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it it's three slot because it actually does perform that well and I would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers off and put water blocks on them uh with four of them running especially because you don't need the interconnects anymore so it would look extremely clean no Crossfire Bridges it's all done over the PCI Express Bus and would perform incredibly well now before I hand off to Luke for benchmarking and telling you guys you know what I've been teasing just exactly how fast this card is I'd like to give MSI some props here even though they are asking for a significant premium for the privilege they're giving their customers the option to push the card as hard as they want with that ln2 bios even at the risk of bricking it and while officially they could reject your warranty for stuff that you do to it in my experience as long as there's nothing physically altered on the card when they receive it back they're not going to do that so if you grab a 290x lightning you can can pretty much go to town on it because this is a very nicely bended GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually quite quiet underload cooler an awesome back plate it looks great and okay okay I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how Ballin this card is all right guys we're going to start off with the bench we have a CPU which is a 3960x clocked at 4.0 GHz for our Ram we have our Ram running at 1866 MHz and for the graphics card it varies so check the overclocking dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards along with the graph that we will show in a moment it did well it did pretty much exactly how I expected and that's not too surprising it's a really well- bended 290x I've been waiting to get a really well- bended 290x so that it could beat my 780 for a while now and this one did it handily it doesn't beat the 780 Ti which is again expected but it's still very nice if you're looking for overclocking tips if you get this card I would highly recommend switching into ln2 mode even if you're just air cooling this seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability to the car and I was able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched into that mode all right guys if you enjoyed this and want to see all the rest of our Linus Tech tips content be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech tips here on YouTube and while you're here and while your cursor is below this video clicking subscribe be sure to also click like share favorite all that kind of stuff and comment on whether or not this is a card you're interested in I know some of the American viewers might be a little bit shaky about getting it just to the cost prohibiti there is on buying a 290 X in the states right now due to coin mining and all that kind of stuff but if you want to talk about that more maybe jump over to the Forum it's a little bit friendlier of a comment section and if you want to get rid of those ads on the Forum you can always contribute any contribution level on the Forum gets rid of all the ads so yeah thanks for watching I'll see you guys next timethis card features a Hawaii XT core with 2,816 stream processors clocked at 1.08 gigahertz boost clock 4 gigs of gddr5 memory on a 512 bit bus and all that's clocked at 5 GHz as well but spoiler alert that's not actually the interesting thing about this product the R9 290x lightning from MSI is the fastest hands down R9 29x card we have ever tested and really it it feels like unlocks the potential of amd's latest and greatest GPU in a way that we haven't seen yet with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts now it's not as simple as I mean I know that sounds great but it's not as simple as just okay well everyone should just get R9 290x lightning cards because it's 150 bucks more than a base R9 290x and even $100 more than msi's pretty strong gaming card that has you know a dual fan cooler and some of that aftermarket stuff that we like to see so like what do you actually get for your extra $100 well for one thing MSI has moved beyond the dual fan twin frozer cooler design to what they're calling the fry frozer and while I'm not necessarily convinced that three fans offers a tangible benefit over two larger ones um what's cool about this design is that each of the fans is pwm and can be individually controlled in software so you could actually run how whichever ones you want however fast you want so you can be like okay well I want the the 86 mm ones on the outside to run faster and the 7mm one I'm going to ramp that one down because when you have smaller fans and you turn the RPMs up they can tend to get a little bit whiny and loud so you can actually control that however you want to um now okay so before we get into some of the other special stuff it does support the usual AMD technology so Crossfire up to four-way although you'll need to water cool it if you want to do that EK does have a block coming for this card specifically because it is a triple slot design out of the box you've got support for AMD mantle uh true audio powertune which is their Dynamic uh clock speed ramping up and ramping down to sort of keep the card safe and within the right temperatures and power you've got easy Affinity with no display port monitor required so you could run three monitors off of two DVI ports in an HDMI port which is really cool or even up to six displays if you use a display port Hub and then of course it's got a 4 gig frame buffer like all r9290 X's for a better 4K gaming experience it also has some unusual stuff so in the extremely sexy folding box that actually has like a drawer at the bottom for the access accessories along with the usual like you know stickers and Driver disc and manual and all that stuff is a certificate of stability adapters for using a multimeter to check voltages and a replacement vrm heat sink for subzero cooling now the card itself is designed with Subzero in mind it uses a completely non-reference PCB with a 12 plus three-phase power design for the GPU and the RAM and three pcie connectors two eight pins and one six pin something that that power hungry GPU core in there may actually need when you're really ramping up the clock speed it's got an ln2 bio switch which is something that manufacturers tell us isn't necessary if you're not going Subzero but this is two cards in a row now that we've run into weird throttling issues on the first one was the Kingpin classified 780 Ti from EVGA that was immediately fixed by enabling ln2 mode and then once ln2 mode was on remember you turn it off flip the switch cuz you're loading a new bios and then reboot it the card was a dream to overclock and we didn't run into any issues at all so also on the top of the card we have an LED indicator to show the card's load so in theory um the lightning logo is green for no load blue for medium and red for a heavy load but in practice uh once we overclocked it it just kind of stayed red because we were pushing it pretty pretty hard and then it also has a series of blue LEDs on the back that show you how many of the power phases are active at any given time I did mention that that cooler takes up three slots but I can see why they did it unlike some three slot coolers I've seen before almost the entire top of the card is basically a solid like grid of aluminum lines and heat pipes running through it and all of that so in terms of the sheer Mass the card is extremely heavy so it's not like they just made it thick in order to like kind of put fancy things on it it's three slot because it actually does perform that well and I would love to see what a system would look like if you did pull the coolers off and put water blocks on them uh with four of them running especially because you don't need the interconnects anymore so it would look extremely clean no Crossfire Bridges it's all done over the PCI Express Bus and would perform incredibly well now before I hand off to Luke for benchmarking and telling you guys you know what I've been teasing just exactly how fast this card is I'd like to give MSI some props here even though they are asking for a significant premium for the privilege they're giving their customers the option to push the card as hard as they want with that ln2 bios even at the risk of bricking it and while officially they could reject your warranty for stuff that you do to it in my experience as long as there's nothing physically altered on the card when they receive it back they're not going to do that so if you grab a 290x lightning you can can pretty much go to town on it because this is a very nicely bended GPU in here with an extremely robust and actually quite quiet underload cooler an awesome back plate it looks great and okay okay I'll stop stalling and I'll hand it off to Luke to let you guys know just how Ballin this card is all right guys we're going to start off with the bench we have a CPU which is a 3960x clocked at 4.0 GHz for our Ram we have our Ram running at 1866 MHz and for the graphics card it varies so check the overclocking dock in the description below and be able to correlate the overclocking settings for those cards along with the graph that we will show in a moment it did well it did pretty much exactly how I expected and that's not too surprising it's a really well- bended 290x I've been waiting to get a really well- bended 290x so that it could beat my 780 for a while now and this one did it handily it doesn't beat the 780 Ti which is again expected but it's still very nice if you're looking for overclocking tips if you get this card I would highly recommend switching into ln2 mode even if you're just air cooling this seemed to add actually quite a bit of stability to the car and I was able to get core clock speeds much higher once I switched into that mode all right guys if you enjoyed this and want to see all the rest of our Linus Tech tips content be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech tips here on YouTube and while you're here and while your cursor is below this video clicking subscribe be sure to also click like share favorite all that kind of stuff and comment on whether or not this is a card you're interested in I know some of the American viewers might be a little bit shaky about getting it just to the cost prohibiti there is on buying a 290 X in the states right now due to coin mining and all that kind of stuff but if you want to talk about that more maybe jump over to the Forum it's a little bit friendlier of a comment section and if you want to get rid of those ads on the Forum you can always contribute any contribution level on the Forum gets rid of all the ads so yeah thanks for watching I'll see you guys next time\n"