FRONTPAGE MSI R9 290X Lightning Video Card Review

Overclockers.com · Mar 26, 2014

Today we will be reviewing the mighty R9 290x Lightning from MSI. Some of us may recall the outcome of the GTX 780 Lightning review wasn't exactly what the enthusiast crowd wanted it to be with the imposed power limits that were in place. Now, to be fair, this was not MSI's fault. That distinction is squarely on NVIDIA's shoulders for their 'green' program. That aside, this is an AMD card and we will have no such limits! That has to be a good thing, right? We will dig down into the nitty gritty of this R9 290x and see what MSI has done to make it warrant the Lightning moniker, and how well it ...

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Woomack · Mar 26, 2014

nice review :thup:

I have only one thing to say ... Lightning with warranty sticker :rofl:

Johan45 · Mar 26, 2014

Great write up Joe! Looks like a really sweet card. :thup:

manu2b · Mar 26, 2014

Well, seems like a sweet card, but I wonder if it's worth paying the premium:

My 290 unlocked with the stock awful cooler does 1200MHz on the core and VRM's never go above 70°C (kind of noisy though

)...

OK, memory can't sustain anything above 1350MHz, but still, it has cr..py Elpida memory.

Edit: good write up as usual Joe!

anthonyg45157 · Mar 26, 2014

manu2b said:
Well, seems like a sweet card, but I wonder if it's worth paying the premium:

My 290 unlocked with the stock awful cooler does 1200MHz on the core and VRM's never go above 70°C (kind of noisy though )...

OK, memory can't sustain anything above 1350MHz, but still, it has cr..py Elpida memory.

Edit: good write up as usual Joe!

If it makes you feel better, I paid the premium for a gtx 780... it was 529 so not much more than reference. BUT i got elpida memory..

manu2b · Mar 26, 2014

anthonyg45157 said:
If it makes you feel better, I paid the premium for a gtx 780... it was 529 so not much more than reference. BUT i got elpida memory..

Lol, thanks!

I got a real good deal on my card: i paid €270 ($350) for a brand new 290 wich unlocked to the x version!

Still, love my old 780 and 780ti...

Woomack · Mar 26, 2014

My 2nd GTX780 has Hynix memory but it's not much better than Elpida in the 1st one ... maybe 10-20MHz better what is nothing. At the end good memory doesn't really help so much in general performance especially when you have memory controller with wide bus like in GTX780/Ti or R9 290/X.

manu2b · Mar 26, 2014

^Agreed.

Got almost no increase in benchmarks (3dmark11/13, heaven, games) with memory@1250 or 1350.

Janus67 · Mar 26, 2014

Nice Joe!

wingman99 · Mar 26, 2014

Looks like a good card for LN2. :drool:

Good job with the review.

I cant get this link to work in your review."Overclockers.com GPU Testing Procedures"

SF101 · Mar 29, 2014

Woomack said:
nice review

I have only one thing to say ... Lightning with warranty sticker

Yep i agree what a joke.. comes with LN2 mode and a warranty sticker.. wth?

soulwatch5 · Mar 29, 2014

Great review only thing i would recommend doing is changing the colors on the graphs next time so they are not so similar to each other. Its hard to distinguish between the different shades of white on my small laptop with key of the graph.

Lvcoyote · Mar 30, 2014

wingman99 said:
I cant get this link to work in your review."Overclockers.com GPU Testing Procedures"

Link fixed, thanks for the heads-up!

wingman99 · Mar 30, 2014

Lvcoyote said:
Link fixed, thanks for the heads-up!

Thanks for fixing it.

FRONTPAGE MSI R9 290X Lightning Video Card Review

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