AMD RADEON R9 290X Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅24-10-13
Detailed Look


First we removed the shroud which is a simple plastic affair to reveal an enclosed, longitudinal aluminium heatsink design. The blower, as discussed earlier is the same used on previous designs which is quiet good at low RPM but could make your ears bleed at full pelt!


The underside of the cooler is made up of a black painted steel brace with the contact plate to the core being copper. The mid-plate makes contact with both the VRM and memory areas via thermal interface pads ensuring every component receives direct cooling.


The PCB layour appears to be effeciently designed to cut down on electrical noise thanks to the VRM area being positioned closest to the power input points. 16x256MB GDDR5 modules frame the exposed core with an additional inductor and twin MOSFETs closest to the input/output area.


The VRM is a 6+1 power phase design utilising both solid capacitors and Coiltronics ferrite core lo profile surface mount inductors.


Regulating voltages is a 2nd generation Serial VID (SV12) interface. It is capable of 255 voltage steps between 0.00V and 1.55V which means that what ever power the GPU is demanding, it can provide this with precision.


The 16x256mb GDDR5 memory modules come courtesy of Hynix and carry the product code of H5GQ2H24AFR R0C which is the same memory used on more recent editions of the HD7970 so are proven performers.


Finally we reach the heart of the R9-290X the Hawaii core. Featuring over 5 TFLOPS of compute performance with over 6 billion transistors along with supporting DirectX 11.2 we expect some blistering performance from this sliver of silicon.

I think it is time we found out just how fast this new flagship card really is...


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