AMD R9 290 4GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

Overclocking the R9 290 with stock voltage we were able to add an impressive 163MHz which is 17.8%. On the memory we added 300MHz which was 24%. After all the confusion about the R9 290X and heat throttling performance, we wanted to briefly test that claim and see how much truth there is behind it. Does the heat significantly affect performance? After overclocking the R9 290 we ran our usual OC benchmark with the default fan profile and then again with the fan fixed at 70% (to ensure the 95 degrees throttle limit is never reached. What we found was that with our 17.8% core overclock and our 24% memory overclocking, if we used the stock profile we were only able to boost our performance from P12377 to P12912 which is a puny boost of 4.3%. By eliminating heat throttling from the equation with a high fan speed we were able to boost the performance to P13686. That’s a 10.6% increase. That means from this little test alone, throttling can make as much as 6.3% difference in performance – a significant number when most cards in a series are often spaced out in performance by about 10%.

If we went back and re-ran all our tests with that same fan speed the R9 290 would probably match or better than R9 290X. The counter claim to this would be if you do the same with an Nvidia GPU Boost 2.0 card it would have the same effect….yes to an extent, but mainly no. Yes you’d get better performance if you were using a reference solution (not a non-reference one) but Nvidia’s cooler is much much better so the throttling impact on performance is minimal, maybe 1-2% at the most, not the 6.3% we are seeing on the AMD card. We’ve also got a Gigabyte GTX 780 WindForce OC graphics card in this chart which never ran hotter than 76 degrees celsius (80 degrees is the throttle limit) at extreme loads and from our results we can see an overclocked R9 290 with no heat limitations is better than an overclocked GTX 780 with no heat limitations. Interesting stuff indeed.