ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 03.04.14Page:
The card
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ASUS decided to equip the Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC with the latest revision of their famous DirectCU II cooler. It is exactly the same cooler ASUS puts on the GeForce GTX 780 and the 780 Ti DirectCU II series, and no changes have been made. In this case you get no less than five heatpipes, two of which are six millimeter, two eight millimeter and one with a massive ten millimeter diameter. The heatpipes have been nickel plated and are in direct contact with the GPU core. Soldered to the heatpipes you will find the fin stack which is being provided with fresh air via two 95mm fans. The fan closer to the I/O shield is a hybrid axial/radial fan which ASUS likes to call "CoolTech". They claim that this fan is able to provide a higher airflow than standard axial or radial fans at the same noise level. In case of the second fan you find a standard axial fan. Both fans are being manufactured by Everflow and strangely share the same model name, T129215SU.
Overall the cooler is well made and the finish is on a very reasonable level too. Good thermal paste has been spread all over the core in large quantity but the memory chips did not get active cooling.
Like the reference model, the ASUS DirectCU II OC has a DIP switch to select between two BIOS options. Unfortunately, the switch positions are not labeled. The SW1 position is silent mode and the SW2 is the performance mode. There is also no note in the bundled documentation or on the website product page. Unlike the reference model, ASUS chose to equip this graphics card with a silent mode BIOS and a performance mode BIOS, rather than a normal/uber mode BIOS options. In our opinion ASUS made the right choice. We have tested both modes and surprisingly we did not experience any performance loss while using the silent BIOS. The only difference we noticed were regarding the temperatures and fan speeds. In case of the silent BIOS, the fan was always around lowest speed between 20-25% and in this case the GPU temperature was around 90°C. These temperature readings are nothing to be worried about as the R9 Series chip can take it. With the performance BIOS, the card was trying to keep the GPU temperature between 73 and 77°C (fan speed range: 40-50%).
This card allowed for a maximum stable
overclock to 1100 MHz on the GPU side and 1375 MHz on the memory side. We
used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D benchmark with 15 minutes duration in order to
test the stability. With these
clocks we had to feed the GPU with 1.15 Volt and the memory ran at stock
voltages.
Like most of ASUS' recent high-end cards, the PCB on the ASUS R9 290 DirectCU II OC has been completely reworked and the power design has been beefed-up. A closer look at it shows an 8-phase power implementation for the main power design where the GPU gets six (there are five on the reference card) and the memory gets remaining two phases. The PCB design looks a lot like the one you get with the R9 290X DirectCU II model.
The main power design MOSFETs are being actively cooled via a black aluminum heatsink/thermal pad combo. The manufacturer decided to equip its Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II with both metal reinforcement (located at the top end of the card) and full backplate to prevent bending and protect the card at the same time.
Component wise ASUS uses a high quality design, so called Super Alloy Power, components. Last but not least, located at the rear of the PCB there are several voltage and modification points (VDDCI, MVDD, VDDC, OVCI, OVM, OVC) as well as the ROG Connect soldering points.
Checking the voltage regulation chip we find a digital multi-phase controller labelled Digi+ ASP1300 for the GPU, and one uP1631P from uPI Semiconductor for the memory.
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The memory chips used are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1'260 MHz (5'040 MHz effective).
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