Introduction :
AMD's Hawaii based graphics cards have been around for a while now. At launch, we saw that they were not only pretty fast but also hot and noisy. Asus tries to improve the card by giving it a custom cooler, which really cuts down those temperatures and noise, but with Digi+ VRM, high quality capacitors and MOSFETs, they also improve the overclockability and stability of the card.
The R9 290 is the slightly cut down version of the 290X, but it still packs a solid punch. It has 2560 shader processors and 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at 5040MHz (effective) makes it perform well even at resolutions like 2560x1440 or even 3840x2160 (with some minor compromises in quality). This card competes with the GTX 780, but carries a slightly cheaper tag. In case you don't have the time to read the complete review, you can skip to the conclusion to get an overall summary of the review, for the in depth analysis and benchmarks, just go through the following sections.
Package and Unboxing :
The card comes in a fairly large box with the typical Asus branding. The rear of the box talks about the main features of the card – Digi+ VRM , DirectCU II cooling and the GPU tweak overclocking and monitoring tool.
Inside, you get the classy Asus packaging which encloses the card safely. You also find a power adapter, driver and utility disc and a manual along with the card. Fairly basic, nothing fancy about the bundle.
Closer Look :
Taking a closer look at the card, The card looks very similar to many other Asus graphics cards, but one thing I realized immediately was this one is a heavy thing. Its much heavier than anything I have reviewed before, which can mainly attributed to the cooler. Its got 5 10mm thick direct contact heat pipes and an array of aluminium fins to dissipate that heat.
The card has 4GB of memory and here you can see that with 16 Elpdia memory chips (part no : W2032BBBG-6A-F).
This sweet looking thing is the Digi+ VRM Asus was boasting about. It is a 8 phase power design for high quality/stable power delivery to the GPU even at high loads.
Asus has provided voltage pickup points so that you can directly measure various voltage parameters and you don’t need to rely on software or perform any mods during an OC session.
Testing Methodology :
We tried to keep all tests as fair as possible. In games, whenever possible, we tried using in game benchmarks. But not all games have that, so we had to recreate the same scene manually. Hence, the results might not be perfect, but they should give you a fairly good idea. These scenes might not be the most graphics intensive (no explosions, etc) as they are much harder to reproduce.
To remove any possibility of bottlenecks, we have overclocked our 2500k to 4.5GHz and the RAM is overclocked as well. Below are the detailed test bench specifications :
Processor : Intel Core i5 2500k (Overclocked to 4.5GHz)
Motherboard : ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard
RAM : 8GB DDR3 RAM (@ 2133MHz ,10-10-10-26-1T) Samsung 30nm Green RAM
Graphics Card : Asus R9-290 DirectCu II OC 4GB (Driver version : Catalyst 14.3)
PSU : Corsair 550VX
Cooling : SVG Tech HOC 40
Casing : Bitfenix Prodigy
Here is the list of games that we have used for our review:
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 3
Crysis 2 (with HD texture pack)
Crysis 3
Formula One 2013
Mafia 2
Hitman Absolution
GRID 2
Starcraft 2
All games are running at 1920×1080 and maximum in game settings. Feel free to suggest more benchmarks.
Overclocking :
So before we look at the benchmark results, lets see how this card overclocks. The overclocked results have been included so you can see what kind of real world gains are seen. For overclocking, I used the EVGA Precision X utility. I cranked up the power limit to maximum to obtain these results. I left all other settings to auto.
The maximum overclock on the core I could get was 1105 MHz, which was a healthy 105Mhz above what the card came with. The memory however, was fairly poor and I could only manage 1300MHz (40Mhz OC). The benchmarks would crash immediately at any speeds above these.
With these settings, we saw some decent performance gains of about 10% in most of our benchmarks. Here are the results for battlefield 4.
Temperatures and Noise :
Temperatures did not look so good, I expected it to be a lot better with the cooler Asus has used, but to be fair, the 290 is a hot chip. The idle temperatures were about 46c and on load it got up to 72c. These temperatures are slightly high, but nothing to worry about at all and are well within safe operating limits.
Battlefield 4 :
Battlefield 3 :
Crysis 3 :
Crysis 2 :
Starcraft 2 :
Mafia 2 :
Hitman Absolution :
F1 2013 :
Grid 2 :
The Verdict :
From our tests we can see that the R9 290 does come close to the performance of the GTX 780. It might be slower, but is much cheaper too. I think it strikes a great balance between price and performance and I think in that aspect, it has the edge over the GTX 780/290X. Asus has done a good job and brought down the temperatures of this card to a much more comfortable value (down to mid 70s from 90s in stock cards). 4GB memory really helps if you are thinking of high resolution gaming (1440p and above) which I think is another strength over the GTX 780. Overall, I am really pleased with the Asus R9 290 DirectCu II and at a price of around Rs39,500, it is an expensive card but does have all the performance to back that price tag up. I’ll give it a solid 9/10 for a better balance between price and performance.
Original Post : http://techverdict.com/asus-r9-290-directcu-ii-oc-graphics-card-review/
AMD's Hawaii based graphics cards have been around for a while now. At launch, we saw that they were not only pretty fast but also hot and noisy. Asus tries to improve the card by giving it a custom cooler, which really cuts down those temperatures and noise, but with Digi+ VRM, high quality capacitors and MOSFETs, they also improve the overclockability and stability of the card.
The R9 290 is the slightly cut down version of the 290X, but it still packs a solid punch. It has 2560 shader processors and 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at 5040MHz (effective) makes it perform well even at resolutions like 2560x1440 or even 3840x2160 (with some minor compromises in quality). This card competes with the GTX 780, but carries a slightly cheaper tag. In case you don't have the time to read the complete review, you can skip to the conclusion to get an overall summary of the review, for the in depth analysis and benchmarks, just go through the following sections.
Package and Unboxing :
The card comes in a fairly large box with the typical Asus branding. The rear of the box talks about the main features of the card – Digi+ VRM , DirectCU II cooling and the GPU tweak overclocking and monitoring tool.
Inside, you get the classy Asus packaging which encloses the card safely. You also find a power adapter, driver and utility disc and a manual along with the card. Fairly basic, nothing fancy about the bundle.
Closer Look :
Taking a closer look at the card, The card looks very similar to many other Asus graphics cards, but one thing I realized immediately was this one is a heavy thing. Its much heavier than anything I have reviewed before, which can mainly attributed to the cooler. Its got 5 10mm thick direct contact heat pipes and an array of aluminium fins to dissipate that heat.
The card has 4GB of memory and here you can see that with 16 Elpdia memory chips (part no : W2032BBBG-6A-F).
This sweet looking thing is the Digi+ VRM Asus was boasting about. It is a 8 phase power design for high quality/stable power delivery to the GPU even at high loads.
Asus has provided voltage pickup points so that you can directly measure various voltage parameters and you don’t need to rely on software or perform any mods during an OC session.
Testing Methodology :
We tried to keep all tests as fair as possible. In games, whenever possible, we tried using in game benchmarks. But not all games have that, so we had to recreate the same scene manually. Hence, the results might not be perfect, but they should give you a fairly good idea. These scenes might not be the most graphics intensive (no explosions, etc) as they are much harder to reproduce.
To remove any possibility of bottlenecks, we have overclocked our 2500k to 4.5GHz and the RAM is overclocked as well. Below are the detailed test bench specifications :
Processor : Intel Core i5 2500k (Overclocked to 4.5GHz)
Motherboard : ASRock Z77E-ITX Motherboard
RAM : 8GB DDR3 RAM (@ 2133MHz ,10-10-10-26-1T) Samsung 30nm Green RAM
Graphics Card : Asus R9-290 DirectCu II OC 4GB (Driver version : Catalyst 14.3)
PSU : Corsair 550VX
Cooling : SVG Tech HOC 40
Casing : Bitfenix Prodigy
Here is the list of games that we have used for our review:
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 3
Crysis 2 (with HD texture pack)
Crysis 3
Formula One 2013
Mafia 2
Hitman Absolution
GRID 2
Starcraft 2
All games are running at 1920×1080 and maximum in game settings. Feel free to suggest more benchmarks.
Overclocking :
So before we look at the benchmark results, lets see how this card overclocks. The overclocked results have been included so you can see what kind of real world gains are seen. For overclocking, I used the EVGA Precision X utility. I cranked up the power limit to maximum to obtain these results. I left all other settings to auto.
The maximum overclock on the core I could get was 1105 MHz, which was a healthy 105Mhz above what the card came with. The memory however, was fairly poor and I could only manage 1300MHz (40Mhz OC). The benchmarks would crash immediately at any speeds above these.
With these settings, we saw some decent performance gains of about 10% in most of our benchmarks. Here are the results for battlefield 4.
Temperatures and Noise :
Temperatures did not look so good, I expected it to be a lot better with the cooler Asus has used, but to be fair, the 290 is a hot chip. The idle temperatures were about 46c and on load it got up to 72c. These temperatures are slightly high, but nothing to worry about at all and are well within safe operating limits.
Battlefield 4 :
Battlefield 3 :
Crysis 3 :
Crysis 2 :
Starcraft 2 :
Mafia 2 :
Hitman Absolution :
F1 2013 :
Grid 2 :
The Verdict :
From our tests we can see that the R9 290 does come close to the performance of the GTX 780. It might be slower, but is much cheaper too. I think it strikes a great balance between price and performance and I think in that aspect, it has the edge over the GTX 780/290X. Asus has done a good job and brought down the temperatures of this card to a much more comfortable value (down to mid 70s from 90s in stock cards). 4GB memory really helps if you are thinking of high resolution gaming (1440p and above) which I think is another strength over the GTX 780. Overall, I am really pleased with the Asus R9 290 DirectCu II and at a price of around Rs39,500, it is an expensive card but does have all the performance to back that price tag up. I’ll give it a solid 9/10 for a better balance between price and performance.
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