Value Award
PowerColor R9 290 4GB OC
RRP: $399.99 | Website: www.powercolor.com
Test Machine
• INTEL Core i7 4960X
• ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Black Edition (0208)
• CORSAIR Dominator
Platinum 4x4GB DDR
2666MHZ CL10
• Corsair Force LS 240GB SSD
• Cooler Master Silent Pro M2
1500W
• Windows 7 64-bit SP1
(Catalyst 13.9 B11)
T
o say AMD’s Hawaii GPUs
have been anything but
controversial would be
an understatement. At least
in a gaming sense especially
because of the new Mantle API.
This is AMD’s game changer
and if it does take off, it would
make for a very interesting GPU
landscape. The incentive from
AMD’s perspective for doing this
is sensible but how that works
for us as end users remains
to be seen. No matter how it’s
spun, we have been here before
in the mid to late 90s and this is
no different in practice.
That however is specifically
to do with gaming which is
primarily what this card is for.
The absence of customised
designs has left very little room
for variance in overclocking
26 The OverClocker Issue 27 | 2013
between different vendor
offerings. So essentially
what we bring to you here
is a reference card review
of the AMD R9 290 GPU. The
only difference here is that
PowerColor has seen it fit to
ship their card with a slight
overclock, more specifically a
25MHz overclock. Everything
else about the card though
remains that which AMD showed
off and has been providing to
its other partners. A 25MHz
overclock is not going to
make a significant different in
performance but having that
at least would perhaps help
separate the PowerColor card
from the rest. Even better
though or more meaningful
than the slight overclock is
how this particular card didn’t
have a dynamic clock speed
dependant on temperature.
Load temperatures were very
high at 94’C however the clock
speed remained at 975MHz.
This is great if only you’re
guaranteed performance that
matches that of the AMD press
cards and because of the minute
overclock the performance is
actually better for the most part.
Oddly enough, despite what we
had read before purchasing
our PowerColor sample for
this review, this card remained
relatively quiet. More so than we
could have ever thought it would
be. There simply wasn’t any
noise while we tested the card
and as stated earlier, the clock
speeds remained consistent.
It is only when we increased
the fan speed from the default
profile to anything above 60%
where the noise levels became
unbearable.
Under normal circumstances
though, there would be no
need to do this despite the
high load temperature. If the
GPU is able to operate at that
temperature and not result in
decreased performance, then
we see no need to set a higher
fan speed. Overclocking will
obviously require you to do so,
but in a gaming context, this
isn’t necessary at all given that
you’re only ever going to get
noise for it and nothing else.
At $400, the closest card to
this from NVIDIA would be the
GTX 770, however it’s obvious
that this GPU will not be able to
compete with the R9 290, thus
we had to instead compare it
with the many custom GTX 780
cards on the market. In this
particular case we compared it
to the EVGA GTX 780 Classified.
A GPU that, like many, features
an out-the-box overclock,
custom PCB, and cooler has