MSI Radeon R9 290 Gaming 4G Twin Frozr
Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2014 4:12 pm
Just sharing my experience as I found this card to be surprisingly quiet. The high point is that the two 100mm fans can go as low as 900 RPM, which is great. This is with using the MSI Afterburner software to create a custom fan curve. Previously I was happy with my Sapphire HD7950 Dual-X that could get down to 1050, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a base of 900 RPM here. I've been eyeing reviews of this card and the ASUS dual fan card, but as reviewers in general do not report this factor I kinda took a chance on this MSI card when it became available.
Otherwise it's similar to the ASUS card in that it's total length is a little shorter(28cm) than others, and that it also has a back plate providing rigidity and some protection for the PCB. The triple(80mm) fan cards from Sapphire and Gigabyte are naturally at least a little bit noisier at idle, but could potentially be less so at heavier loads.
Less impressive is the current state of power saving for these R9 290 series of chips. I'm using the same driver as for my HD7950, but the cards clocks rise up from the idle levels very often. Even when there is nothing running that should normally trigger it, like an video running without any hardware acceleration. While the card isn't exactly heating up at light loads, the power consumption at doing lighter loads like web surfing, Youtube'ing (with h/w acceleration off) or movie watching is definitely higher than with say a HD7950. I'm guessing that this can be improved with a future driver and to most it's probably kinda irrelevant if a performance gaming card draws maybe 10-20W extra outside gaming, but I know that it's an important enough factor for some. I'm more just unsatisfied to see any kind of backwards development, but I also know from the past that this is something that the driver crew can do to avoid some graphics glitch at idle clock levels until they work it out. The card certainly does enter its 300 GPU 150 Mem clock states when the system is truly idling at least.
Otherwise it's similar to the ASUS card in that it's total length is a little shorter(28cm) than others, and that it also has a back plate providing rigidity and some protection for the PCB. The triple(80mm) fan cards from Sapphire and Gigabyte are naturally at least a little bit noisier at idle, but could potentially be less so at heavier loads.
Less impressive is the current state of power saving for these R9 290 series of chips. I'm using the same driver as for my HD7950, but the cards clocks rise up from the idle levels very often. Even when there is nothing running that should normally trigger it, like an video running without any hardware acceleration. While the card isn't exactly heating up at light loads, the power consumption at doing lighter loads like web surfing, Youtube'ing (with h/w acceleration off) or movie watching is definitely higher than with say a HD7950. I'm guessing that this can be improved with a future driver and to most it's probably kinda irrelevant if a performance gaming card draws maybe 10-20W extra outside gaming, but I know that it's an important enough factor for some. I'm more just unsatisfied to see any kind of backwards development, but I also know from the past that this is something that the driver crew can do to avoid some graphics glitch at idle clock levels until they work it out. The card certainly does enter its 300 GPU 150 Mem clock states when the system is truly idling at least.