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290 or 290x

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I am looking to upgrade to either 290 or 290x. Currently i am thinking about either MSI or Sapphire but i am not sure what i should go for 290 or 290x, please advise on what i should get.

Also which brand do you guys recommend MSI, sapphire or Asus?
 
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I am looking to upgrade to either 290 or 290x. Currently i am thinking about either MSI or Sapphire but i am not sure what i should go for 290 or 290x, please advise on what i should get.

Also which brand do you guys recommend MSI, sapphire or Asus?
i prefer between msi or asus, which one that lower? since both give you better cooler
but i prefer msi 290x right now
 

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If money is not a concern, I'd swing for the 290X just because it's a little more performance. As Brandon mentioned, plan for better than reference cooling.

Personally i went with Sapphire's 290: Sapphire because they had handled my last RMA like a pro and 290 instead of X since it was cheaper, with no complaints. Granted, it's on water so noise and heat and no longer an issue.
 
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I see that you're already running 2x 770s in SLI. Going either 290 or 290X would not be an upgrade, would be a little bit of a downgrade honestly. Keep what you have, that's my suggestion. But if you're hellbent on switching it out, I'd recommend a high-quality non-reference 290X (MSI Lightning, ASUS DC II OC, Sapphire Vapor-X) just going by what you already have in your system.
 
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R9 290 > R9 290X
Extra 7% performance is not worth +30% extra money... :p
 
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Sapphire much more better ! :)
 
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The MSI has a downgraded VRM. And the Sapphire is almost guaranteed to have Hynix ram ICs. So the sapphire is better. The R9 290 is almost equal to the R9 290X once you run them at the same clocks.
 
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Sapphire > Asus > non-ref with LC > MSI "Gaming" imho. There is still no MSI Lightning available ;p
 

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From a guy who's used both and owned some. I recommend a non-reference R9 290 as at the same clocks the 290X is only 3-7% faster which isn't worth the large premium bud.


The MSI has a downgraded VRM. And the Sapphire is almost guaranteed to have Hynix ram ICs. So the sapphire is better. The R9 290 is almost equal to the R9 290X once you run them at the same clocks.
This isn't entirely true as my Sapphire R9 290 had Eplida VRAM
 
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This isn't entirely true as my Sapphire R9 290 had Eplida VRAM
There are at least pictures of it having Hynix ICs where as the other brands have only been seen with Elpida ICs
 
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MSI 290x Gaming.
 
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Buy 290 and hope to unlock to 290x. o_O
 
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I am looking to upgrade to either 290 or 290x. Currently i am thinking about either MSI or Sapphire but i am not sure what i should go for 290 or 290x, please advise on what i should get.

Also which brand do you guys recommend MSI, sapphire or Asus?


I have 3 of the MSI R9-290x, and I am extremely satisfied with them. They've given me no issues what so ever, and I can't confirm the memory. I haven't had a chance to put water-blocks on them. I've had no driver or graphic issues...

Personally, I would wait if I were you. Right now, only reference cards are out, and non-reference cards are coming into the market. The main reason why I am saying you should wait is because there could be a revision coming out. If you've seen the article from Hardware360, they indicated that Hawaii isn't a "full Hawaii." This means that the Hawaii GPU isn't using it's full set of Streaming Processors. The count of Streaming Processors is still 2816 active or open on the GPU, but Hawaii actually has 3072 streaming processors. So you're only using 90% of the Streaming Processors on the R9-290x. That's a difference of 10%. This could also translate to an increase in FPS performance by a good 10 to 20%.

The reasoning behind this, holding those core back, was so Hawaii wouldn't exceed the 95 degree C temperature. You have additional Streaming Processors or Cuda Cores, you get additional increases in temperature when those Cores do work. So one can come to the conclusion that AMD knew they had crappy, air-cooled fans on the R9-290x and 290. Plus, they didn't have any fan-solutions at the time to deal with the additional 10% cores on the Hawaii GPU.

I suspect, AMD could release a revision like the 7970 GHZ Edition for the R9-290x. We'll probably see something before or after a Dual GPU solution. It depends on how AMD want to milk it's consumer base. Right now, it's perfectly fine with the situation. Even though NVidia's GTX 780 Ti is only performing 2% to 20% better in the FPS area, R9-290 and R9-290x consumption is going up because of the current base, but you also have to look at the bit-mining consumers. They want AMD Graphic Cards because there is more Streaming Processors. More SP equate to more ALUs at higher core frequencies that do redundant processing. Therefore, they have a higher first derivative on the hash rate. A 10% increase in SP on the Hawaii GPU could equate to a 10% increase on that hash rate, without overclocking.
 

manofthem

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Buy 290 and hope to unlock to 290x. o_O

There's a tool you can download and run which should tell you if your 290 will unlock. I stumbled upon it on overclock.net (I think) and it seemed to have good response. It'll save you having to try it without knowing. Says mine isn't unlockable but I haven't confirmed it yet.

I have 3 of the MSI R9-290x, and I am extremely satisfied with them. They've given me no issues what so ever, and I can't confirm the memory.

The new test build of gpuz will tell you which chips are on your cards. the tool I mentioned above also tells you, but I can't link it now since I'm mobile.
 
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