Read this article at https://www.pugetsystems.com/guides/522 Radeon R9 290X Performance Analysis Written on November 21, 2013 by Matt Bach

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Introduction AMD's new Radeon R9 290X is a new video card that is being heavy discussed in the enthusiast PC community as it gives performance that is close to or better than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan, but at roughly half the cost. One of the features of the R9 290X is the inclusion of a hardware switch that changes the card between two fan profiles called "Quiet" and "Uber". The differences between these profiles is only evident when the GPU is under load and works by changing how the GPU keeps itself cool when it starts running hot. In our testing, we found that these two profiles change the fan speed and core clock speed by the following rules: Quiet Profile Uber Profile Fan ramps up to a maximum speed of 2200 RPM Once the fan hits 2200 RPM, the card throttles down the core clock speed to keep from overheating If the card throttles all the way down to 730 MHz, the Quiet profile is overridden and the fan starts ramping up above 2200 RPM. At this point, the card can clock back up somewhat, but appears to stay below ~850 MHz Fan ramps up to near maximum RPM before throttling the GPU clock Once the card hits the maximum fan RPM, the card starts throttling down the core clock speed Since the Quiet profile only ramps the fan up 2200 RPM (which on our cards is about 44%) before reducing the core clock, there is obviously going to be a performance hit in many situations if you use the Quiet profile. This has been shown in almost every R9 290X review currently published, but the most of the benchmarks show very little performance difference between the Quiet and Uber profiles. However, when we started our own testing, we saw a much larger difference. To understand what might be causing our results to vary so much from other published reviews, we decided to expand beyond our normal testing.

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Tags: Radeon, R9 290X, Quiet, Uber, Performance