PowerColor R9 290X OC vs GTX 780 Ti – the overclocking gloves come off!

This is our third evaluation in a series pitting the PowerColor R9 290X OC against the GTX 780 Ti.  This evaluation will feature the PowerColor card, and this time we shall overvolt, lock the fan speeds to 100%, and drop the ambient temperatures for each card to declare an overall performance winner.  We are focusing particularly on the $579 PowerColor OC (overclock) BF4 edition and will set AMD’s flagship card against Nvidia’s flagship in 30 game benchmarks.

The GTX 780 Ti is Nvidia’s brand-new $649 single-GPU flagship video card based on GK110 just as the $1000 Titan and the GTX 780 are. The GTX 780 Ti replaces the now $499 GTX 780 as flagship, and both are offered with a 3-game Holiday Bundle including Assassin’s Creed IV–Black Flag, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and Batman: Arkham Origins.

Although we are going to focus on the PowerColor’s performance and especially on overclocking it beyond its base clocks as we set it against the GTX 780 Ti, we shall also give you the Big Picture as we compare with stock Uber and Quiet configurations, as well as with seven other top video cards.

The PowerColor R9 290X OC vs. the GTX 780/GTX 780 Ti

The reference version of the R9 290X is clocked up to 1000MHz while the PowerColor 290X OC Edition is clocked up to 1030MHz .  Memory clocks are 1250MHz at stock GDDR5 5000 speeds. The regular R9 290X is priced starting at $549 including a version of the PowerColor 290X OC that does not include BattleField 4.  Some vendors are including BF4 with their cards for $549 while others aren’t.

The reference GTX 780 can be found for as little as $449 and it is currently sold with a three game Holiday bundle as well as with a $100 Shield discount. We have already found that the stock 290X is faster than the GTX 780, although the stock GTX 780 Ti at $649 slots above the mildly overclocked PowerColor 290X.

What about overclocking?

We already found that our evaluation sample of the reference GTX 780 Ti overclocks well on stock fan profile and stock voltage so that it performs significantly faster than the mildly overclocked PowerColor R9 290X.  Now we want to crank up the voltage, turn up each card’s fans to 100% and see how far each card will overclock and how the performance compares.

For this evaluation, you will see us pit the overvolted and overclocked-to-the-max PowerColor R9 290X against the GTX 780 Ti, also at max clocks. We are also going to compare with the reference GTX 780, as well as with 6 other top cards to see how well the overclocked PowerColor 290X OC does. For this evaluation, we are benching 30 modern games and 4 synthetic benchmarks at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.

Since we do not want any chance of our CPU bottlenecking our graphics, we are testing all of our graphics cards by using our Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, 16 GB Kingston “Beast” HyperX DDR3 at 2133MHz, and an EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard. The EVGA FTW motherboard features the 16x+16x PCIe 3.0 specification for CrossFire/SLI. The Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz is fast enough to differentiate even high-end video cards at high resolution and at high detail settings.

Before we look at our test bed and run benchmarks, let’s unbox our PowerColor R9 290X OC video card and look at its specifications.