The Card Experience: A Review of the AMD 290X

Running IT at $109 90, which was 40 MHz higher than their standard 1050 clock even when I was playing with all of the GPU GPU tweak settings you have to use their GPU tweak program if you want to get full unlocked capability with the card and voltage and whatnot. Now I couldn't put the voltage any higher than 1.3 volts uh by choice because if I did the vrm's got smoking hot and over time they would start to degrade and get artifacting and then crash so I couldn't get anywhere near the 1.4 uh volts that's allowed on this card. So I really started thinking is this card terrible? I won't say the card is really terrible for everybody now what do I mean by that who is this card tailored to is this card tailored towards overclockers or is this card tailored toward mainstream purchasers.

In fact, the correspondence I had with Asus pretty much confirmed it. This is a card designed for people looking for water cooling ln2 cooling etc etc which to me kind of begs the question why put this big old beefy giant air cooler on there. I mean the card still got to 90° C on the gamer profile now this thing has some profiles in it you can just click the G and it goes to a gamer profile which is a tiny tiny overclock but it still got to 90° C with this big old giant cooler on there and Asus again confirmed it. Well, you know the Hawaii GPU is very hot so that means means even this massive cooler was having a hell of a time keeping it cool.

They said the card was really tailored towards ln2 coolers and water coolers now that really makes me a little bit disappointed in the sense that they addressed that with the 780 Poseidon by putting a built-in water block as well as a heat uh heat sink on here for air cooling they should have done that with this card especially at the price premium this card is coming in at. Now if they had done that with this card I would have hooked this up to the loop and had a field day with it but they didn't. It means that this card is really tail tailored towards people who would probably rip the cooler off and do custom cooling anyway chances are that's not you and that's where my problem is with this card.

This card has all the bells and whistles on it that were that will be attractive to people who are doing power user type of stuff. Now when it comes to this card on air it was fairly mediocre I mean it it hangs with the 970 now I say it hangs with the 970 because the 970 was actually beating it in just about every test I threw at it which made me think that the poor the poor bin of this GPU I won't say poor bin the poor lottery draw of this GPU just made it to where the 290x was getting beat by the brand new Maxwell 970 and the 970 was doing it cooler more way more efficient better fps and a smaller graphics card. So really this card if you are the kind of person that's doing ln2 overclocking chances are you're probably not watching this video anyway.

And if you are then you're probably lost but if you're the kind of person that wants to walk into Micro Center or walk into Fries or order the card off New Egg and slap it in your system and be up and running I personally feel there are better options out there like the MSI Lightning or the Sapphire Vapor X. There are other 290xs that score way higher on average are cooler and just a better overall experience in my opinion. Now with that said guys take this video for what it is. I'm not trying to be controversial I'm just telling you my experience with this card.

When I started this channel 2 and a half years ago I said that my goal is to give you guys my experiences and my opinions when it comes to technology and I'm going to show it exactly how it happens even if that means that some people might not be too happy with the review. Guys my devotion and my dedication is to the audience and not to manufacturers so hopefully you guys understand as always this has been my experience take it with a grain of salt compare it with other people's experiences and try and get a collective big picture of what's happening with the hardware that you guys are reviewing. You should take no single reviewer's advice or opinion as gospel by themselves always look at the collective and form your own opinion based on what a majority of people are saying.

As always guys follow on Twitter if you have any questions or even if you just want to berate me for not liking this particular AMD card or feeling that there are better options out there as always guys follow on Facebook if you're not into the whole Twitter thing and I certainly hope to see you in the next controversial js2 cense video take care.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is going on YouTube J2 sense here and today we're going to take a look at the not so new but definitely still worth talking about Asus Matrix Platinum R9 290x graphics card this thing has got a ton of bells and whistles we're going to talk about those bells and whistles we're going to see how well it performs and we're going to see whether or not this card well is worth your hard-earned dollars and trust me it's still cost a lot of them with the new cencio performance optimized fans The Cooler Master nepton 240m delivers the perfect balance of noise and performance click the link in the description to find out more now this right here is the R9 290x Matrix Platinum Edition which kind of indicates that maybe there's a non-platinum Edition but this is just what they're calling it it's part of the Republic of Gamers line which is as you know tailored towards hardcore gamers overclockers and enthusiasts now this card still has a heck of a price premium now I have not reviewed uh any r9290 X this is actually my first R9 290x review I did take a look at the MSI uh R9 gaming last year when it very first launched uh but we're going to go ahead and take a look at the R9 290x today for a couple of reasons one it's a badass card and I wanted to take advantage of taking a look at this card and two the R9 290 and 290 X's are starting to really come down in price because as Maxwell launched and the 970 and the 980 were giving amazing quality and quantity of FPS per dollar it was forcing AMD to respond and of course that response is lowering the price now this card is still pretty expensive in fact at the time of reviewing if you can find it in stock it's still about $450 that's a lot of money but you can find 290x is now for as low as $299 that's pretty amazing in itself but this card is pretty expensive still because it is an all custom PCB now I'm not going to get into a whole lot of the super specs if you will I want to talk about what makes this card different from the rest now this card is a dual bios card it has an ln2 bios or liquid nitrogen bios as well as a standard bios now if you were a hardcore overclocker and you were doing things like liquid nitrogen you'd be doing things like custom bios hacking and volt mods and things like that to be able to get unlocked voltage without a software or soft mod which is like soft mod you'd do a hard mod to get maximum voltage unlocked and you guys would be doing all kinds of custom blowtorching on here to keep things from De or from frosting up and freezing where you don't want them to well Asus has kind of gone ahead and figured all of those things out those little those little custom touches that overclockers are putting or ln2 overclockers are putting on their cards and they just went ahead and built it in for instance on the back of the card here you have a safe mode which you can boot into if you if you corrupted something and you just want to revert to a safe bios it's got a bios on here that it copies from over to the standard bios which it uses to reflash itself if you somehow brick the card that is a really cool feature it's something I wish I had in my 780s when I brick the at least the one that I ended up bricking but on the back here it has a four pen Molex that if you flip this little toggle switch right here on the back it's kind of hard to see it turns on a heater it's kind of like defrosting the windows in your car or like airplanes how they have the defroster switch on the wings uh what it does do is it sends a heat circuit it just heats up a circuit that basically traces out the memory and it will defrost the memory so if you're running ln2 your GPU can freeze and you're not going to freeze the memory which could actually hurt stability in extreme overclocking now it's got the Dual fans on here the custom front fan and custom rear fan based on the uh the heat pipes and the way that the heat sink is set on here now the heat sink runs the entire length of the card it's pretty damn heavy actually uh but it's anodized black it looks really really sweet you don't see silver showing through black anodized uh heat pipes on there look fantastic they don't have a sore thumb or stick out like a sore thumb and the nice red accent because it is Republic of Gamers input output it's pretty standard dual DVI HDMI and display port it's got a nice Asus Matrix back plate on here which faces the right way when you look at it some companies didn't think far enough ahead to put the lettering on there reversed so that when it's installed it's actually upside down and that's kind of annoying KN to look at uh it's dual 8 Pin power source requirement on there so it's not the standard six pin and 8 Pin which the 290x has it's a dual eight pin and here is the Dual bio slider right there ln2 and standard now there's not a whole lot else to talk about on here other than the Rog logo on here does light up and change colors based on the load of the graphics card it's uh blue for no load green for a light load uh orange for a medium load and red for a head load on the graphics card so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and plug this thing into my test rig which is a 4770k 16 GB of Corsair 1866 MHz Ram overclock to 2 GHz and uh well the rest it's msim power uh z97 motherboard on there so let's go ahead and throw this thing in there and see how well it performs transition he okay the R9 290x Matrix Platinum from Asus now I've spent a week with this card a solid week of tweaking tuning overclocking benchmarking and doing it over and over and over and over and over again now one would probably ask thems Jay why are you spending so much time overclocking this card over and over and over again well it's because I couldn't determine if maybe I was doing something wrong maybe it was a poor bin maybe it was a bad card I don't know because I could not get the thing to be stable over 1,90 MHz now JJ over at Asus says that that card is uh pretty average when it comes to overclocker now he did say the low side of average but basically most people get anywhere between 1100 to 1125 MHz now that got me thinking this is a custom card completely built from the ground up from Asus specs got tons of power phases the best vrms the best chokes the best capacitors best PCB layout everything in there was just handpicked and cherry-picked and it was like the best card that they could imagine building for AMD and the 295x and the Hawaii based GPU but it really comes down to once again the Silicon Lottery now this particular card was not a fantastic overclocker but I went ahead and noticed that even though I was running IT at$ 109 90 which was 40 MHz higher than their standard 1050 clock even when I was playing with all of the GPU GPU tweak settings you have to use their GPU tweak program if you want to get full unlocked capability with the card of voltage and whatnot now I couldn't put the voltage any higher than 1.3 volts uh by choice because if I did the vrms got smoking hot and over time they would start to degrade and get artifacting and then crash so I couldn't get anywhere near the 1.4 uh volts that's allowed on this card so I really started thinking is this card terrible I won't say the card is really terrible for everybody now what do I mean by that who is this card tailored to is this card tailored towards overclockers or is this card tailored toward mainstream purchasers and in fact the correspondence I had with Asus pretty much confirmed it this is a card designed for people looking for water cooling ln2 cooling etc etc which to me kind of beged the question why put this big old beefy giant air cooler on there I mean the card still got to 90° C on the gamer profile now this thing has some profiles in it you can just click the G and it goes to a gamer profile which is a tiny tiny overclock but it still got to 90° C with this big old giant cooler on there and Asus again confirmed it well you know the Hawaii GPU is very hot so that means means even this massive cooler was having a hell of a time keeping it cool now they said the card was really tailored towards ln2 coolers and water coolers now that really makes me a little bit disappointed in the sense that they addressed that with the 780 Poseidon by putting a built-in water block as well as a heat uh heat sink on here for air cooling they should have done that with this card especially at the price premium this card is coming in at now if they had done that with this card I would have hooked this up to the loop and had a field day with it but they didn't it means that this card is really tail tailored towards people who would probably rip the cooler off and do custom cooling anyway chances are that's not you and that's where my problem is with this card this card has all the bells and whistles on it that were that will be attractive to people who are doing power user type of stuff now when it comes to this card on air it was fairly mediocre I mean it it hangs with the 970 now I say it hangs with the 970 because the 970 was actually beating it in just about every test I threw at it which made me think that the poor the poor bin of this GPU I won't say poor bin the poor lottery draw of this GPU just made it to the to where the 290x was getting beat by the brand new Maxwell 970 and the 970 was doing it cooler more way more efficient better fps and a smaller graphics card so really this card if you are the kind of person that's doing ln2 overclocking chances are you're probably not watching this video anyway and if you are then you're probably lost but if you're the kind of person that wants to walk into Micro Center or walk into fries or order the card off new egg and slap it in your system and be up and running I personally feel there are better options out there like the MSI lightning or the sapphire Vapor X there are other 290 XS that score way higher on average are cooler and just a better overall experience in my opinion now with that said guys take this video for what it is I'm not trying to be controversial I'm just telling you my experience with this card when I started this Channel 2 and a half years ago I said that my goal is to give you guys my experiences and my opinions when it comes to technology and I'm going to show it exactly how it happens even if that means that some people might not be too happy with the review but guys my devotion and my dedication is to the audience and not to manufacturers so hopefully you guys understand as always this has been my experience take it with a grain of salt compare it with other people's experiences and try and get a collective big picture of what's happening with the heart that you guys are reviewing you should take no single reviewer uh advice or opinion as gospel by themselves always look at the collective and form your own opinion based on what a majority of people are saying as always guys follow on Twitter if you have any questions or even if you just want to berate me for not liking this particular AMD card or feeling that there are better options out there as always guys follow on Facebook if you're not into the whole Twitter thing and I certainly hope to see you in the next controversial js2 cense video take care nhey what is going on YouTube J2 sense here and today we're going to take a look at the not so new but definitely still worth talking about Asus Matrix Platinum R9 290x graphics card this thing has got a ton of bells and whistles we're going to talk about those bells and whistles we're going to see how well it performs and we're going to see whether or not this card well is worth your hard-earned dollars and trust me it's still cost a lot of them with the new cencio performance optimized fans The Cooler Master nepton 240m delivers the perfect balance of noise and performance click the link in the description to find out more now this right here is the R9 290x Matrix Platinum Edition which kind of indicates that maybe there's a non-platinum Edition but this is just what they're calling it it's part of the Republic of Gamers line which is as you know tailored towards hardcore gamers overclockers and enthusiasts now this card still has a heck of a price premium now I have not reviewed uh any r9290 X this is actually my first R9 290x review I did take a look at the MSI uh R9 gaming last year when it very first launched uh but we're going to go ahead and take a look at the R9 290x today for a couple of reasons one it's a badass card and I wanted to take advantage of taking a look at this card and two the R9 290 and 290 X's are starting to really come down in price because as Maxwell launched and the 970 and the 980 were giving amazing quality and quantity of FPS per dollar it was forcing AMD to respond and of course that response is lowering the price now this card is still pretty expensive in fact at the time of reviewing if you can find it in stock it's still about $450 that's a lot of money but you can find 290x is now for as low as $299 that's pretty amazing in itself but this card is pretty expensive still because it is an all custom PCB now I'm not going to get into a whole lot of the super specs if you will I want to talk about what makes this card different from the rest now this card is a dual bios card it has an ln2 bios or liquid nitrogen bios as well as a standard bios now if you were a hardcore overclocker and you were doing things like liquid nitrogen you'd be doing things like custom bios hacking and volt mods and things like that to be able to get unlocked voltage without a software or soft mod which is like soft mod you'd do a hard mod to get maximum voltage unlocked and you guys would be doing all kinds of custom blowtorching on here to keep things from De or from frosting up and freezing where you don't want them to well Asus has kind of gone ahead and figured all of those things out those little those little custom touches that overclockers are putting or ln2 overclockers are putting on their cards and they just went ahead and built it in for instance on the back of the card here you have a safe mode which you can boot into if you if you corrupted something and you just want to revert to a safe bios it's got a bios on here that it copies from over to the standard bios which it uses to reflash itself if you somehow brick the card that is a really cool feature it's something I wish I had in my 780s when I brick the at least the one that I ended up bricking but on the back here it has a four pen Molex that if you flip this little toggle switch right here on the back it's kind of hard to see it turns on a heater it's kind of like defrosting the windows in your car or like airplanes how they have the defroster switch on the wings uh what it does do is it sends a heat circuit it just heats up a circuit that basically traces out the memory and it will defrost the memory so if you're running ln2 your GPU can freeze and you're not going to freeze the memory which could actually hurt stability in extreme overclocking now it's got the Dual fans on here the custom front fan and custom rear fan based on the uh the heat pipes and the way that the heat sink is set on here now the heat sink runs the entire length of the card it's pretty damn heavy actually uh but it's anodized black it looks really really sweet you don't see silver showing through black anodized uh heat pipes on there look fantastic they don't have a sore thumb or stick out like a sore thumb and the nice red accent because it is Republic of Gamers input output it's pretty standard dual DVI HDMI and display port it's got a nice Asus Matrix back plate on here which faces the right way when you look at it some companies didn't think far enough ahead to put the lettering on there reversed so that when it's installed it's actually upside down and that's kind of annoying KN to look at uh it's dual 8 Pin power source requirement on there so it's not the standard six pin and 8 Pin which the 290x has it's a dual eight pin and here is the Dual bio slider right there ln2 and standard now there's not a whole lot else to talk about on here other than the Rog logo on here does light up and change colors based on the load of the graphics card it's uh blue for no load green for a light load uh orange for a medium load and red for a head load on the graphics card so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and plug this thing into my test rig which is a 4770k 16 GB of Corsair 1866 MHz Ram overclock to 2 GHz and uh well the rest it's msim power uh z97 motherboard on there so let's go ahead and throw this thing in there and see how well it performs transition he okay the R9 290x Matrix Platinum from Asus now I've spent a week with this card a solid week of tweaking tuning overclocking benchmarking and doing it over and over and over and over and over again now one would probably ask thems Jay why are you spending so much time overclocking this card over and over and over again well it's because I couldn't determine if maybe I was doing something wrong maybe it was a poor bin maybe it was a bad card I don't know because I could not get the thing to be stable over 1,90 MHz now JJ over at Asus says that that card is uh pretty average when it comes to overclocker now he did say the low side of average but basically most people get anywhere between 1100 to 1125 MHz now that got me thinking this is a custom card completely built from the ground up from Asus specs got tons of power phases the best vrms the best chokes the best capacitors best PCB layout everything in there was just handpicked and cherry-picked and it was like the best card that they could imagine building for AMD and the 295x and the Hawaii based GPU but it really comes down to once again the Silicon Lottery now this particular card was not a fantastic overclocker but I went ahead and noticed that even though I was running IT at$ 109 90 which was 40 MHz higher than their standard 1050 clock even when I was playing with all of the GPU GPU tweak settings you have to use their GPU tweak program if you want to get full unlocked capability with the card of voltage and whatnot now I couldn't put the voltage any higher than 1.3 volts uh by choice because if I did the vrms got smoking hot and over time they would start to degrade and get artifacting and then crash so I couldn't get anywhere near the 1.4 uh volts that's allowed on this card so I really started thinking is this card terrible I won't say the card is really terrible for everybody now what do I mean by that who is this card tailored to is this card tailored towards overclockers or is this card tailored toward mainstream purchasers and in fact the correspondence I had with Asus pretty much confirmed it this is a card designed for people looking for water cooling ln2 cooling etc etc which to me kind of beged the question why put this big old beefy giant air cooler on there I mean the card still got to 90° C on the gamer profile now this thing has some profiles in it you can just click the G and it goes to a gamer profile which is a tiny tiny overclock but it still got to 90° C with this big old giant cooler on there and Asus again confirmed it well you know the Hawaii GPU is very hot so that means means even this massive cooler was having a hell of a time keeping it cool now they said the card was really tailored towards ln2 coolers and water coolers now that really makes me a little bit disappointed in the sense that they addressed that with the 780 Poseidon by putting a built-in water block as well as a heat uh heat sink on here for air cooling they should have done that with this card especially at the price premium this card is coming in at now if they had done that with this card I would have hooked this up to the loop and had a field day with it but they didn't it means that this card is really tail tailored towards people who would probably rip the cooler off and do custom cooling anyway chances are that's not you and that's where my problem is with this card this card has all the bells and whistles on it that were that will be attractive to people who are doing power user type of stuff now when it comes to this card on air it was fairly mediocre I mean it it hangs with the 970 now I say it hangs with the 970 because the 970 was actually beating it in just about every test I threw at it which made me think that the poor the poor bin of this GPU I won't say poor bin the poor lottery draw of this GPU just made it to the to where the 290x was getting beat by the brand new Maxwell 970 and the 970 was doing it cooler more way more efficient better fps and a smaller graphics card so really this card if you are the kind of person that's doing ln2 overclocking chances are you're probably not watching this video anyway and if you are then you're probably lost but if you're the kind of person that wants to walk into Micro Center or walk into fries or order the card off new egg and slap it in your system and be up and running I personally feel there are better options out there like the MSI lightning or the sapphire Vapor X there are other 290 XS that score way higher on average are cooler and just a better overall experience in my opinion now with that said guys take this video for what it is I'm not trying to be controversial I'm just telling you my experience with this card when I started this Channel 2 and a half years ago I said that my goal is to give you guys my experiences and my opinions when it comes to technology and I'm going to show it exactly how it happens even if that means that some people might not be too happy with the review but guys my devotion and my dedication is to the audience and not to manufacturers so hopefully you guys understand as always this has been my experience take it with a grain of salt compare it with other people's experiences and try and get a collective big picture of what's happening with the heart that you guys are reviewing you should take no single reviewer uh advice or opinion as gospel by themselves always look at the collective and form your own opinion based on what a majority of people are saying as always guys follow on Twitter if you have any questions or even if you just want to berate me for not liking this particular AMD card or feeling that there are better options out there as always guys follow on Facebook if you're not into the whole Twitter thing and I certainly hope to see you in the next controversial js2 cense video take care n\n"