AMD Radeon R9 290 Review Roundup

[Becky]

Reviews of the new AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card have been hitting the net! Here's a round up of what the reviewers think about it:

"The AMD Radeon R9 290 gives you more performance than ever at the $399 price point! It is a good thing that NVIDIA dropped the price down to $499 on the GeForce GTX 780 as the Radeon R9 290 would have really made it look bad. For $399 the AMD Radeon R9 290 is the video card to have if you are serious about gaming. It walks all over the GeForce GTX 770 ($335) and is very competitive with the GeForce GTX 780 ($499). AMD has a huge price gap between the GeForce GTX 770 and the GeForce GTX 780 and the Radeon R9 290 is exploiting it to the fullest.

Many gamers are also going to be upgrading their systems thanks to game titles like Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty: Ghosts, so it looks like AMD has a winner this holiday with the Radeon R9 290!"

- Legit Reviews

"As with the R9 290X's launch, it's hard to deny the R9 290's appeal in terms of pure bang for buck, as the card is priced directly between Nvidia's GTX 780 and GTX 770 but consistently produces frame rates closer to those of the more expensive card. The £80 price gap between the R9 290 and GTX 780 also leaves plenty of room for custom cards (due later this year) to slot into, some of which could prove attractive if they're able to tame the R9 290's heat output while giving the GTX 780 a run for its money, which factory overclocks could certainly achieve.

The £320 price point leaves the R9 290 4GB with a sector of the market pretty much to itself, as Nvidia's upcoming GTX 780 Ti will obviously supersede the GTX 780. The costliest GTX 770 variants do exceed £300, but really the R9 290 4GB is now the best bet for anyone with £300 or so to spend on a new GPU. That said, if you're sticking with a 1080p screen for the foreseeable future, the GTX 770's new price makes it a fantastic deal. Forking out extra for the GTX 780 could also be worth it if you're especially concerned about heat and noise output, as the Hawaii GPU again falls down in these areas. If that's too much to ask though, then for the reasons mentioned above it's certainly worth waiting to see what AMD's board partners have in store for us in a few months."

- Bit Tech

"When we first saw the Hawaii GPU a couple of weeks ago in the form of R9 290X it was hard not to be impressed by the framerate performance. Throughout that review it managed to outperform the GTX 780 OC in many of our tests and did so with a price advantage in its favour. There was one notable drawback though, heat... or more specifically the cooler RPM required to manage that heat on the reference design. The R9 290X is a HOT GPU... one that consistently expels 90°C+ air out of our system even when running at high RPMs and noise levels. With the R9 290 AMD have a GPU which finds a much more reasonable balance of performance and noise. The power use is still higher than an overclocked GTX 780 and the temperature higher too but noise is now more under control and that makes it much easier to recommend. That said, as we also noted in the 290X review, if AMD put better coolers on their reference cards it would push manufacturers to do even better again, benefitting everyone..."

- Hardware Heaven