Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 20.08.14Page:
The card
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With this card you get a typical blower type cooler, which means a radial fan is being used. Usually this type of cooler doesn't manage to keep cards as cool as any other custom heatsink. The main advantage of this type of cooler is that air is being blown out of the case, making for lower internal temperatures. The fan in this case has to move air through quite a dense heatsink. A closer look at the finstack reveals, it has been soldered to a copper base plate. That piece of copper is then in direct contact with the GPU. Other than that you can clearly see the different thermal pads, which are located in between the cooler and the memory chips as well as VRM area. This apparently means, that also the VRM area as well as the memory chips receive active cooling. As you will see in our noise level testing, the AMD reference cooler is really not silent.
This card allowed for a maximum stable
overclock to 1150 MHz on the GPU side and 1650 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 1.21 Volt and the memory ran at stock
voltages.
The reference design forsees, that Radeon R9 290 graphics cards should be equipped with at least a six phase power design regarding the GPU, one phase for the memory and another one for the PLL. Good for stability and durability is the fact, that the power design receives active cooling. Checking the voltage regulation chips we find an IR 3567B.
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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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