AMD's Radeon R9 290 Delivers 290X Performance For $150 Less 183
crookedvulture writes "The back and forth battle for PC graphics supremacy is quite a thing to behold. Last week, Nvidia cut GeForce prices in response to the arrival of AMD's latest Radeons. That move caused AMD to rejigger its plans for the new Radeon R9 290, which debuted today with a higher default fan speed and faster performance than originally planned. This $400 card offers almost identical performance to AMD's flagship R9 290X for $150 less. Indeed, it's often faster than Nvidia's $1000 GeForce Titan. But the 290 also consumes a lot more power, and its fan spins up to 49 decibels under load. Fortunately, the acoustic profile isn't too grating. Radeon R9 290 isn't the only new graphics card due this week, either. Nvidia is scheduled to unveil its GeForce GTX 780 Ti on November 7, and that card could further upset the balance at the high end of the GPU market. As AMD and Nvidia trade blows, PC gamers seem to be the ones who benefit."
Additional reviews available from AnandTech, PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware.
Anandtech Fucked Up (Score:4, Interesting)
They used a shitty case with absolutely horrible acoustic profile to measure the card noise and got a whopping 57 dB.
Had they bothered to use a real case, they'd have had it almost half as loud (looks like everyone else managed to stay under 50 dB.)
It's like Anandtech never heard of Delta Fans, either.
Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia (Score:5, Interesting)
The real story is a $400 AMD card can perform as well as or better than a $1000 Nvidia one....
Re:um (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Title should focus on AMD vs Nvidia (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
Yesterday and today I installed 20 Titans in a compute cluster at work, replacing the crappy GTX480's that crash constantly. The cost of these ($20K) would buy us TWO nodes on the local K20 cluster.
We don't really care that much about the float performance, even; much of our code is memory-bandwidth bound, and much of the rest runs iterative sparse-matrix solvers that can be run in "mixed precision", where you iterate a hundred times in single precision, do one update in double precision, a hundred more in single... So we could use the cheaper gamer cards, but the Titan's a price/performance sweet spot that we can't beat. It's even faster than the K20, and compared to the other gamer cards the 6GB memory gives us a huge amount of flexibility.
Re:Better headline: AMD's Radeon R9 290 Slashverti (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasnt always that way. For the most part you could just use the latest drivers and everything would be OK, but about 2 years ago I started having issues where a game wouldnt work with one driver while another game wouldnt work with the ones that would work with... which bothered me but didnt push me over the edge. Then the reports in June of the newest drivers killing cards, and rendering horrible artifacts in many games...
Its a shame, because I was really eyeballing that vanilla GTX 650 that runs on 64 watts...
In the intrim I picked up an A10-6800K with its integrated HD 8670D which I am extremely impressed with (low expectations shattered), and now I am eyeballing the HD 7790 that runs on 85 watts.