ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC Review
Published by Christian Ney on 10.01.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC ASUS has an almost flawless custom R9 290X graphics card in its porfolio. The card is fast, doesn't throttle like reference models, has a nice design and a decent factory overclocking, even the memory is overclocked which is rare thing these days. Cooling performance is on a very competitive level and we very much like the fact that ASUS decided to equip the card with a DIP switch just like on the reference card but they went for a different BIOS configuration with a silent and a performance BIOS to chose from. In addition to the backplate, there is the option to create either a black/red or black/gold color scheme, which makes the card suit nicely to both the ASUS classic motherboards or the ASUS ROG motherboards. |
- Performance
- Cooling performance - Design - colored stickers bundled - Backplate - Memory Clock - Noise levels - BIOS DIP switch |
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| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| Honestly, we're highly positively surprised by this
cooler. In the past we didn't aggree with serveral descisions made
regarding fan profiles, but this cooler is excellent and it definitely
can't be compared to any reference cooler. In performance mode (BIOS SW2) temperatures are very good but in this case the card starts to be audible under load (39.5 dBA). With the silent BIOS (SW1) temperatures are high - 95°C for the GPU - but the card is very silent, the fans don't spin much higher than when the card is in idle. The BIOS DIP switch is really a nice feature here and we would love to see this on all high-end cards. |
- Cooling performance
- Noise levels |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| Overall performance is very good since the DirectCU
II model doesn't throttle like reference cards. The factory
overclocking on the core and memory paired up with the good cooling
solution make this Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC a tiny bit faster than a
reference GeForce GTX 780 Ti. A closer look at power consumption reveals that the figures are reasonably good in idle with 55 Watts. It's only 7 Watts more than a R9 280X for example. Under load it's another story. 420 Watts is quite something, but this can be expected, since there is a Hawaii GPU doing it's job underneath the massive cooler. Overall performance/watt is therefore not as competitive as with NVIDIA cards. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| Overall the Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC from ASUS is a very good graphics card. The noise level with the performance BIOS could be a tiny little bit better, but since it's a performance BIOS there is definitely nothing to seriously complain about. Also the pricing is appropriate. This card might cost 130 Euro more than a reference R9 290X but since it is as fast as a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, which costs the same, pricing is just about right. | - Gaming | ||
| We gave the Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC from ASUS 5 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
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