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

The PowerColor R9 290X OC BF4 Edition

All of the currently available R9 290X cards are reference versions.  Vendor cooling solutions will probably not be available until the second week of December, about the same time that Nvidia’s partners will be releasing overclocked GTX 780 Tis.

Currently, PowerColor’s main differentiation from other AMD partners is the company that stands behind it with a 2-year warranty, excellent customer service, and technical support should you need it. The PowerColor 290X itself is mildly overclocked and has excellent characteristics which may indicate that the GPU was binned.

There is nothing fancy to see from the outside of the box. The card arrives in a PowerColor box that advertises the card without its specifications. It emphasizes overclocking, Battlefield 4, 4GB of GDDR5 memory, support for Eyefinity and 4K resolutions, and it also mentions DX11.2 and PCIe 3.0.

On the back of the box, we see the card’s features as well as the power and system requirements.

The PowerColor 290X OC video card comes well-protected by padding and also protected from static electricity.

Inside the box, besides the new 290X OC, we find a driver CD, manual, Battlefield 4 coupon, and a Molex to 6-Pin to 8-pin PCI-E power adapter.The PowerColor R9 290X OC has a good-looking design and it uses a single-cooling blower-style fan much like the reference HD 7970. Unfortunately, the Hawaii GPU used in the R9 290X runs much hotter than the Tahiti GPU used in the HD 7970 and the fan struggles to cool it under load with some rather loud fan noise as a result. There are two dual-link DVI, one HDMI 1.4, and one DisplayPort 1.1a connector available to easily connect to 4 displays and to even to use them simultaneously. The R9 290X is setup for pairing with another 290X but a CrossFire bridge is not included as it is unnecessary with Hawaii GPUs. Just like with Nvidia cards, you can mix cards from different vendors with different clock speeds. In addition, unlike with Nvidia cards, there is much more flexibility to mix cards with different amounts of cores and different framebuffers.

As we turn the card over, we can see that there are no CrossFire connectors since the bandwidth is now shared over the PCIe bandwidth.   We can also see the  the 6-pin+8-pin connectors for the PCIe cables.

Let’s check out the PowerColor R9 290X specifications from their website:

Specifications

Here are some of the features:

GCN Architecture

A new design for AMD’s unified graphics processing and compute cores that allows them to achieve higher utilization for improved performance and efficiency.

AMD Eyefinty Technology

Run multiple displays from a single graphics board and expand your gaming field of view across all displays.

AMD App Acceleration

AMD App Accelerator creates a “co-processing” environment in which the compute processing potential in your AMD Radeon™ Graphics processor works together with the system central processor, to accelerate enabled applications.

AMD HD3D Technology

Supports the latest stereoscopic 3D content and display technologies. Play 3D games, watch Blu-ray 3D videos, and edit 3D photos on your 3D Monitors, TV, or projector.

AMD CrossFire™ Technology

Multi-GPU support offers superior scalability. Increase your gaming performance up to 2x with AMD CrossFire™ technology, 2.75x for TriFire configurations, or 3.75x with QuadFire configs.

Microsoft DirextX® 11.2

Get intense gaming performance and unrivalled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting and lifelike imagery.

AMD HD Media Accelerator

Assumes rendering responsibility for HD encode (VCE)/decode (MPEG-4 ASP, H.264. MVC, MPEG2, etc.) and conclusively enable superior video playback quality with advanced hardware post-processing algorithms.

AMD PowerPlay™ Technology

AMD PowerPlay™ Technology dynamically adjusts clockspeeds in response to GPU load, saving power for just when you need it.

AMD PowerTune Technology

Maximizes performance under load conditions by dynamically increasing the GPU engine clock to take advantage of unused TDP headroom. Also allows users to configure their own TDP limit, within a provided range, for even higher performance or more power efficiency.

Advanced GDDR5 Memory Technology

GDDR5 memory provides the highest available memory bandwidth of any memory technology today, enabling higher GPU performance.

Intelligent Overclocking Control

AMD latest Boost State technology automatically allows Radeon Graphic to run higher than the base core speed if it’s operating below power, current, and temperature specification limits.

Dolby® TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio™

Support of content protected, high bandwidth, 7.1 channels of surround sound over HDMDI and DisplayPort.

We can’t wait to test maximum overclocking for the PowerColor 290X OC, but before we begin the testing, head over to our testing configuration.