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Retail Radeon R9 290X Graphics Cards Slower Than AMD's Press Samples
crookedvulture writes "AMD's recently introduced Radeon R9 290X is one of the fastest graphics cards around. However, the cards sent to reviewers differ somewhat from the retail units available for purchase. The press samples run at higher clock speeds and deliver better performance as a result. There's some variance in clock speeds between different press and retail cards, too. Part of the problem appears to be AMD's PowerTune mechanism, which dynamically adjusts GPU frequencies in response to temperature and power limits. AMD doesn't guarantee a base clock speed, saying only that the 290X runs at 'up to 1GHz.' Real-world clock speeds are a fair bit lower than that, and the retail cards suffer more than the press samples. Cooling seems to be a contributing factor. AMD issued a driver update that raises fan speeds, and that helps the performance of some retail cards. Retail units remain slower than the cards seeded to the press, though. Flashing retail cards with the press firmware raises clock speeds slightly, but it doesn't entirely close the gap, either. AMD hasn't explained why the retail cards are slower than expected, and it's possible the company cherry-picked the samples sent to the press. At the very least, it's clear that the 290X exhibits more card-to-card variance than we're used to seeing in a PC graphics product."
This has been discussed in many places like toms hardware. Essentially they found the cards volting is determined in the bios and the fan speeds can be altered. change the bios which many have released and the undervolting which occurs at lower temps is solved. Sapphire already released a new bios for the card to make these changes to keep them consistent yet keeping them from going above 95 degrees.
Cherry-picking would be a bad thing; but if it turns out that the junior thermal past application technicians get less attentive once the first production batch is finished and the people who've been babying the project leave, that wouldn't be a total surprise.
This is becoming a habit for AMD. You can't even trust their FRAPS measured frame-rates. Seriously. I will never ever own another AMD card. Their graphics cards are nothing but empty promises and bad drivers.
Oh gosh I hope this doesn't result in some poor sap attempting to play Battlefield 4.7 and while thinking they should achieve a pure 115fps they only hit a measly 92fps and their lives are ruined forever. The consequences will never be the same.
Toms Hardware covered this pretty extensively a month ago.
The short story is that AMD is throttling clock speeds to hold within a temperature limit. They learned the hard way that 40% PWM does not equal 40% fan speed, especially across all fans the OEMS used. There's a driver fix for that now measures fan speed and adjusts accordingly when in quiet mode that eliminates most of this performance discrepancy (retail cards can now see higher performance in line with review samples).
Remaining differences between cards may be due to different heatsink grease, also already examined by replacing the grease on a retail card for a significant performance gain.
Someone obviously didn't buy the turbo liquid nitrogen supply option.
I use Intel/Nvidia with FreeBSD because they have better driver support than AMD/ATI.
Nope. The 290/290X is a much larger chip - similar architecture, but bigger (and mildly improved).
I used to be an Nvidia guy until last week. Just hopped onto the crypto coin mining bandwagon and my new 7950 card should pay for itself in ~2-3 weeks.
Nvidia are junk for this, unfortunately.
And it shows, you try to find a new or 2nd hand 79xx card anywhere for a reasonable price. They have all been snapped up by the miners :(
um yea coin mining now days, you will barley break even vs cost of card and electric needed to mine them. you missed the bandwagon by about 1-2 years.
There are lots of alt-coins in addition of bitcoin.
Some are easier to mine on GPU than other.
You need to pick up a coin that plays well with it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If you bothered to RTFA (I know!), you'd see that they indeed checked this out. They flashed the BIOS of their sample card onto their worst performing retail card. There was a small difference, but far from enough to make up for the gap between that card and the sample unit they received from AMD
Not that BIOS. As other have pointed in the thread, the variation in performance is more or less linked to the variance of thermal management.
Not all PWM Fan behave the same. There's a *newer* BIOS version (not as in "use the one that came with the sample" but as in "download the latest version that was made available on the manufacturer website, betwen when you bought it and now").
This version of BIOS is better at computing what signal it should send to the fan to have better cooling.
And once the cooling is improvent, the card will automatically scale up its speed.
Also, there can be difference in thermal grease, etc.
At this point it's reasonable to assume that AMD cherry-picked the cards they sent reviewers to make sure they were as good as they could be.
Or, instead of cherry-picking, maybe there's some build quality between the first engineering sample sent by AMD, and the mass-produced card by NONAME asian manufacturer ? (Or even mass-produced cards by very popular brands that have to fulfill lots of orders ?)
Difference in quality of the fans (NONAME will pick whatever is currently the cheapest, and even with popular big-names, there's going to be some variance, depending on where the current batch was sourced).
Difference in quality of thermal conduction of the interface. Difference of quality of thermal grease (NONAME will pick the cheapest, bigname might have variation in batches, specially if they source batch from several manufacturer to keep up with the pace). Difference in quality of work (NONAME might even do a sloppy job in applying the thermal medium to the radiator).
You end up with exactly the same chip produced by AMD, but vastly different thermal condition, all this with a firmware and a driver which isn't yet best at fan throttling, and you end-up with some measurable difference in output. ...BUT...
Pick up Nvidia cards, and you're going to see exactly the same effect.
Either card that vary in their performance (or that have big variation in temperature, depending on how the current firmware throttles the card)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The latest ones crash ALOT if you read maximumpc.com or tomshardware.com and my Nvidia fanboys I raid with.
AMD has better quality hardware with less flaky voltage regulators. I went through 2 nvidia cards over 8 years that failed and switched all AMD/ATI in 2010 with the phenom II (better that steamroller per clock tick sadly ) and an ATI 5750.
Had one bizaare issue with black edges on the screen when switching to HDMI. That problem went away after I went into the drivers and configured my screen to not do underscanning.
NO issues for 2 years! Just upgraded to an ATI 7850 and it runs GREAT. No black screens, no overheating, no wierd driver issues at all. This was true in 2002 with the ill fated ATI Rage Pro 128 TV adapter. The Mac version was the only one that worked ok.
But damn that was 11 years ago!
I admit I do not like steamroller, but over all I got a nice $600 system that is 6core, runs VMWare accelerated, back in 2010 back when I would need an Intel extreme edition for $700 without anything else but the damn chip!
What they do not tell you is Intel cripples the bios and turns off hyperthreading and Virtualization support to force you into the more expensive units. AMD chipsets never do this.
IF AMD gets their act together and not create underperforming space heaters I will consider AMD again for a CPU purchase. But what I have works great and the phenom II was a pretty competitive chip for its time.
Raedons are great GPUs and are very competitive with Nvidia. Drivers are worse today with Nvidia unless they clean things up.
http://saveie6.com/