AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB Video Card Review

By

Test System

Before we look at the numbers, let’s take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done using a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. It should be noted that we average all of our test runs. There has been some concern of people testing a cold card versus a hot card, but we’ve always done out testing ‘hot’ since the site started back more than a decade ago.

Video Cards & Drivers used for testing:

  • NVIDIA GeForce 341.40
  • AMD: Catalyst 13.11 V8 on R200 series and Catalyst 13.6 Beta 2 on Radeon 7000 series

Intel X79/LGA2011 Platform

290x-test-system

test-system

The Intel X79 platform that we used to test the all of the video cards was running the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard with BIOS 4401 that came out on 09/02/2013. The Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz quad channel memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-27 2T memory timings. The OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD was run with firmware version 2.25.

The Intel X79 Test Platform

Component

Brand/Model

Live Pricing

Processor

Intel Core i7-3960X

Motherboard

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe

Memory

16GB Corsair 1866MHz

Video Card

Various

Solid-State Drive

OCZ Vertex 3 240GB

Cooling

Intel RTS2011LC

Power Supply

Corsair AX1200

Operating System

Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB Video Card GPU-Z Information:

radeon-290-gpuz

290-idle