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Asus R9 290x Directcu Ii Users Manual

Asus R9 290x Directcu Ii Users Manual Average ratng: 3,6/5 9372 reviews

Is The Crossfire Connector Going AWOL?

Jun 05, 2014  Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X OC 4GB; Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 3GB; AMD Radeon R9 290X 4GB; ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC 4GB. Advises affected users to roll back. Jun 05, 2014  Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X OC Review. We've already seen one Sapphire cooling solution for AMD's Hawaii chips when we looked at the R9. The new ASUS GTX 560 DirectCU II OC DirectX® 11 graphics card is top-selected and factory overclocked to 850MHz - an 40MHz more than reference. It features dual fan cooling to push twice more airflow than reference. Using exclusive ASUS Voltage Tweak and Super Alloy Power technologies, the GTX 560 enables totally stable overclocking performance with full HD, multi-screen 3D Vision™ Surround.

Allow me to deal with this item straight away, Yes and No. Not for the refresh products just yet, but starting with the Radeon R9 290 and 290X the Crossfire bridges will disappear.

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Here's a fun fact - that Crossfire bridge we all know and learned to love is slowly being phased out, starting with R9-290/290X. In the near future Crossfire bridges will be thing of the past as AMD is going to run Crossfire over the PCI Express bus. Especially with standards like PCI-E Gen 3.0 there's plenty of bandwidth there, but even at Gen 2.0, it really should not be an issue.

For the R290 cards setup in Crossfire, PCIE Gen 3.0 is recommended. We'll be performing some bus flood tests over Gen 3.0 in a later stage. What if you do not have PCIE 3.0 compatibility? Well, the bus will revert to Gen 2.0 which will probably not make more then a marginal difference as it is really hard to flood even two x8 Gen 2.0 ports. BTW, it is a myth that Crossfire with 290 card would not work on Gen 2.0 slots.

True Audio

AMD presented the following as a pretty big feature. Thus far however this new feature has been received with a bit of skepticism as most enthusiast PC users already have a dedicated soundcard. Anyhow, audio immersion is a key factor for AMD as they are now implementing an audio pipeline into the newest GPUs. Now first, please understand that AMD True Audio only is available at the R7 260X and the upcoming Radeon R9-290 and R9-290X. Next to that, future products based on new silicon will get this as well. But NOT the rest of the R7/R9 series as those products are respins of older GPUs like Pitcairn and Tahiti.

And AMD is implementing a fully programmable audio engine, True Audio technology. You guys know programmable shaders for visuals right? To some extent that now applies for audio as well; to improve audio effects (real-time voices and audio channels in your game opposed to what is possible with CPUs today) enabling directional (surround) audio over input. To do so AMD injected DSPs into the GPU that can do some magic on the audio channels.

For the geeks:

R9 290x Drivers

  • There are multiple Audio optimized DSP cores
  • Tensilica HiFi2 EP instruction set
  • Tensilica Xtensa SP Fload support
  • The DSPs have 32KB instruction and data caches
  • 8KB of scratch RAM for local operation.

So yes, an audio processor is onboard the 260X and the 290 series. For example surround with stereo could be virtualized. There isn't enough CPU power left to run complex audio mechanisms and this is where the technology kicks in. So professional grade audio is now closer to the PC with this new audio technology. Try to imaging High Quality Reverbs, Room Simulation True 3D audio dedicated audio processing. Game developers can use what is called a Wwise audio plugin to get all this going over the AMD True Audio DPS. This is going to help with CPU load. A few simple Audio effects can use up-to 14% of your CPU, this is now offloaded to the graphics card. That's always good stuff. But not available for the R9-270 and 280 though.

Value and Conclusion

  • The Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC is currently available in the US for $700.
  • No throttling
  • Low noise during gaming
  • Overclocked out of the box
  • Memory has also been overclocked
  • Hynix memory
  • Good overclocking potential
  • Dual BIOS
  • Native full-size HDMI and DisplayPort
  • HDMI cable included
  • Very high retail price in the US
  • No backplate
  • Card is very long, might not fit all cases
  • Idle noise levels not improved

Radeon R9 290x Drivers

The Sapphire Radeon R9 290X Tri-X OC is an excellent implementation of a custom design Radeon R9 290X. While it still uses an AMD reference design PCB, it improves significantly on AMD's two major shortcomings - heat and noise. With its performance BIOS active, the card is 2% faster than the AMD reference design because of its overclock out of the box. Memory is also overclocked, which boosts its performance some more. However, there are faster pre-overclocked R9 290X cards, but the performance difference to those cards is quite small. This makes the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X 2% faster than NVIDIA's GTX Titan, but 8% slower than the GTX 780 Ti. While AMD's reference design card often throttles to prevent overheating, Sapphire's card does not, always running at full speed.
As mentioned before, the card uses AMD's reference board, but cooling has received a major overhaul. The card may not fit into smaller cases because Sapphire chose to use three fans in a dual-slot form factor, though, which makes the card 31 cm long. But this choice also provides more room for the cooling technology to improve temperatures and noise. Our tests had the Tri-X produce very good gaming noise levels that are slightly quieter than the GTX Titan and GTX 780 Ti. While the card is far from inaudible, it has still taken a big step in the right direction. Noise levels in idle haven't improved at all, which is a shame. Sapphire could have engineered an extremely quiet card for work in idle, which would have benefited people who do not game all the time and want their PCs to be as quiet as possible. Don't get me wrong, the card is quiet in idle, but it could be virtually inaudible. Sapphire decided not to use the dual BIOS feature for a performance/quiet BIOS combo, which means that user can't opt to run the card very quietly but with higher temperatures or with lower temperatures but a bit more noise. The ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC does have the option, and I consider it an extremely useful feature because it eliminates the need for manual fan control via software. But with only a single BIOS, the Tri-X's acoustics (37 dBA) and temperatures (73°C) are well tuned. I would have opted for slightly higher temperatures with less noise as there is a ton of temperature headroom to do so. Remember, AMD's reference design runs 95°C, which is perfectly safe. I think Sapphire tried to focus on lower temperatures to impress people who get scared by such high temperatures, though. The ASUS DC II OC with its quiet BIOS enabled is a better choice if you want the absolutely quietest R9 290X out there, and it even comes with that backplate Sapphire's Tri-X doesn't have.
GPU Overclocking ends up in the upper reaches of what we've seen on R9 290X cards. Memory overclocking works incredibly well because Sapphire used Hynix chips on their board, which significantly improves overclocking potential and helps avoid the stability issues some users with R9 290 series cards running Elpida chips are encountering.
In the US, the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X is available online for around $700, which is a $30 increase over the current reference design price of $679. These price levels are clearly insane, and there is no reason to buy a 290X at that price. Only slightly more expensive, the GTX 780 Ti is much faster and comes with better power/heat/noise. The Sapphire Tri-X retails for €500 in Europe, while the reference design costs €445, which is a more reasonable price, and the ~10% price increase over the reference board is definitely worth it, without any doubt. If you were to ask me whether I would buy the Sapphire Tri-X or ASUS DC II, I'd still go for the ASUS card because it runs higher clocks, has a dual BIOS that includes AMD's quiet/performance mode, and is shorter, and it includes a backplate.