This is a local forum for local geeks, we'll have no trouble here. Especially as 8pack is gigantour and will smash you.
OK finally home! Tonight I will play a few rounds of 64p BF4 and some Heaven benchmarking. Will be back to post my thoughts!
Fits like a charm! I played BF4 tonight. 1920x1080, ultra everything. Using the latest 11.3 beta 9.2 drivers. According to fraps, over a regular multiplayer game I was averaging about 83 FPS. I cranked the resolution scale to 150% and it dropped to about 50fps. Went down to 125% and over the course of 2 games I managed to average 58.4 fps on Hainan Resort and 64 FPS on Golmund Railway. The sound issue was about what I expected. It's audible, some would say "loud" but that depends on your personal setup. I'm using a Prodigy so it's got pretty much no sound dampening. The case sits to my left meaning the card is on the opposite side of the case relative to my seat. It's an audible whooshing sound with a slight turbine noise I guess. It's not much of a bother and during gaming I didn't even notice it. When engaged in some intense MP matches, you just zone it out. The room I'm in is a large open space with a fan running behind me about 20 feet away and my fiance is watching TV about 15 feet from me. A fairly normal domestic environment. It's really not that bad. It's easy to get carried away when you're looking at charts of noise when the situation it was measured in was a silent room with a microphone 12" from the device. Overall, the noise it makes is a non-issue. Do you notice it? Yes. Does it ruin your life? Only if you're a crazy person. Is it worth waiting for an aftermarket SKU with a different fan? Well.. depends on the price. Would I say it's worth an extra $10-$20 for a quieter fan? Sure. Will you hate yourself for not waiting? I don't! Next up, I'm gonna get the Heaven benchmark and run it a couple of times. I haven't done any temperature monitoring yet.
Heaven benchmark - 8x AA, Ultra Preset, Extreme Tesselation Uploaded with ImageShack.us The temp monitor in Heaven read something like 1.5 million celcius. I don't think that's accurate...
I chuckled Noise is less of a factor for me than heat, also being in a Prodigy. I'm a headphone using single-player gamer through and through, so idle noise is all I really care about for those non-gaming moments.
Same here. I've set up a custom fan profile in Afterburner so my GPUS are quiet until they are ingame. Then I let them rip at 100%.
What about the clocks? How does it boost? Does it throttle? Have you tried overclocking it? Any issues whatsoever?
I know you are keen to play... did you get a chance to see if it sustains the same performance form on half hours use to the next? TBH, there is so much noise from my ESX box I couldn't hear another fan unless it was tearing in to the flesh of my face. EDIT: We aren't too demanding are we...
EDIT: We aren't too demanding are we... [/QUOTE] Of course not! I'll do some more later tonight. Just have very limited time these days...
Yes I am! Very Happy! More Heaven results Run 1 was from a fresh boot, straight into heaven. Run 2 was after the first run and letting it loop in demo mode for about an hour and running the bench again. 1920x1080 8xAA Ultra Settings Extreme Tesselation Run 1: 50.2 FPS 1264 Score 25.4 Min FPS 101.6 Max Run 2: 49 FPS 1234 Score 26.6 Min FPS 100.9 Max FPS Throughout the entire time the specs were: GPU : 947 Mhz Mem: 1250 Mhz Temp: 1,646,683c (seriously) Obviously it's not detecting the temps right yet, but overall, long term use saw no degradation, throttling or significant change in performance. Next up: Heavily modded Skyrim!
Haven't run solid benchmarks yet, but here's what I'm running in Skyrim Max everything Project ENB with high settings All of the amidianborn texture mods a bunch of other texture mods static mesh improvement mods silly level of detail climates of tamriel more stuff than I can remember Performance so far with all of this stuff, high 50s if not 60 FPS. Need to turn off vsync but so far it's running really well. Much better than my old 670 would do with all of this stuff.
Really looking forward to seeing the difference of these cards on water, has anybody found any testing done with waterblocks?
What do you guys make of this? http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/r9-290-accelero-xtreme-290,3671.html I have a R9 290X on order should be here this week after reading reviews i no this baby runs hotter than the sun, Ive never dabbled in aftermarket gfx heatsinks would anybody recommend this and will this affect the warranty?
