Sapphire Vapor-X Tri-X OC R9 290 owners/gurus advice needed (please)

[lightzout]

So I have been on an a very limited budget this last year and was fortunate to find a Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X. Its a workhorse card and so far its been great but I was having heat issues so I reapplied thermal paste and it seems to be much better but I haven't monitored while gaming. I keep it clean as my system is pretty marginal as the most of the core hardware predates windows 10. Every last ounce of performance matters so when it degrades I can tell. Recently Radeon's suite was acting funky so I updated to more recent release but only the stripped down driver version without the wattman performance tuning options. It feels like my gaming experience playing FPS like Battlefield is much better but the fan speed stays low and I have no way to turn it up now. These cards have a manual override switch to reduce noise disabling two fans under certain temps. I have the IFC switch OFF but searching past posts here seems to indicate the fan controls for this card esp using Wattman are finicky and unreliable for some people.

It has dual bios and I have flashed cards before but I usually only do so when I certain it will add something. If it aint broke don't fix it. There seem to be a lot of BIOS options to improve gaming and remedy fan control but I am not confident enough to start so I turn to you for help. This is the way for AMD isn't it? Once you can remove the feature bloat and just dial it in for gaming it is a great value and the lowest spec directx12 capable card. I found it at recycling place for $20 last summer and it may be a while before buying another gpu is possible or necessary. I get respectable performance but only at lower resolution than native monitor. With a heatsink this massive (takes two slots) I imagine there is some performance headroom. I would really appreciate reference to working bios and any custom settings you made for gaming performace.

Danke!

TLDR: Here is my card spec. https://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/details/8nw9z
Flash? Y/N?
If yes, please recommend bios from library and any settings or tweaks unique to this card. Thank you.

 

[damric]

I don't see why you want to mess with the BIOS. Clock/fan tweaking can be done in Sapphire Trixx or good old Afterburner and also quite a lot in the Radeon Driver. Good cards. Lucky find.

 

[111frodon]

Stay in afterburner. It should allow you to customize what you need. Start with a customs fan profile and work from here. This card is one of the best space-heater you can find, so it will always run on the hot side, but the performance it can deliver considering it's age is remarkable. Great find and try your best to keep it cool!

 

[lightzout]

Thank you both. I guess I just bored and want break something. I was not sure Trixxx was working right. But that was on my r9 270 and I think I wanted retro version because i never unlocked the fan control. Afterburner seems overwhelming to me at times. I tried a new asus thing recently and like its simple UP but no fan control unless it a dell wth is that?