News AMD denies cherry-picking R9 290, 290X review cards

Overall the 280X beats a 770, but in nvidia sponsored games (e.g. Metro 2033) it won't. Overclock them both fully and the 280X is definitely ahead. The point really is that AMD wouldn't target the 770 with the 290 as it's miles ahead, and the 280X does the job.

 

Thanks

Wait, someone spent £50 on a 3rd party cooler and their card ran cooler and quieter?

 

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/11/amd-stomps-nvidia-with-r9-290-at-least-in-reviews/

And don't shoot the messenger although feel free to shoot the actual message

 

Well, lots of owners are reporting over 1GHz stable on the 290x with reference cooler with no real throttling problems - up to ~1200MHz. Gibbo's post says:

The reference cooler would obviously be noisy at these clocks, but they're just regular retail models.

 

This kinda thing gets filed under 'no **** sherlock...'

Of course they're going to deny it [likewise nvidia would deny it if it was aimed at them]...

Even *if* it's true AMD/nVidia are hardly gonna fess up and say 'Oh yeah, those cards that the reviewers say is so awesome? Yeah... those aren't the cards we're selling to you...' are they?

 

This sort of news is bad however way you look at it, Let me get this straight people who brought £50 aftermarket coolers are flying oh rly? lol

Its the shitty stock cooler people are moaning about not what some aftermarket mod does.

There is no aftermarket card for the 290x in retail yet so what you get is the stock model only. 99% of people who buy such a card would have no clue how to mod its cooler.

Cant read that language whatever it is so translation would be awesome.

Personally would like to see Bit tech or Anandtech do this test as both are pretty balanced review sites, Every other site is so pro Nvidia or pro AMD so its irelivent.

 

not to mention that installing an aftermarket cooler will void the warranty ...

 

I don't see how hand-picking a GPU would make that much of a difference anyway. The reviewers all prove the clock settings, driver versions, OS, etc. When you've got over 6 billion transistors, you could probably cut out a few thousand and not have much of a performance impact.

Honestly, I actually expected the 290 to have the same performance as the 290X the week before the 290 was even released. I thought the 290X produced maximum heat way too easily, to the point that it would down-throttle itself to below the performance of the 290.

I sincerely think the test results shown for the 290X and 290 from any website are relatively pointless. Their results are so skewed by those ineffective heatsinks. Do some benchmarks with water blocks and then we've got some solid numbers to compare.


@rollo
guru3d.com is probably the most un-biased website I'm aware of, and also of the most thorough and informative.

 

except that multiple reviewers have purchased cards `blind` and got similar if not better results....

 

AMD rep commented with:

 

Because hand-picking anything for review does not show a typical example of your product, and leads to your customers losing faith in the reliability of any future favorable reviews.

AMD isn't selling cards with water blocks on so reviews are done on what is being sold, not what maybe possible on water or LN2.

 

I thought there was something fishy when bit-tech and toms were so vastly different in their results.

 

I want Kaveri

 

That beta driver breaks BF4 as it gives memory leaks, Do not upgrade if running bf4. Its all on the EA forums.

 

Have Bit-tech investigated whether this issue affects their card, and if so, will you be rerunning results and updating the article/issuing an updated article?

 

If anyone's interested, Tom's has a follow up where they look into the differences between the press card, and those bought on Newegg and it appears that the retail models (an Asus and a Sapphire) have lower fans speeds that are causing the GPU to slow:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/radeon-r9-290-driver-fix,review-32821.html

 

so toms after the link bait headlines are now trying to backtrack fast.....