why dont buy reference ? to me reference looks better for my taste

U sure u are talking about AMD reference cooler not Nvidia reference cooler? What i heard was no one said AMD reference cooler is good, it sound like hairdryer, cooling efficiency is bad

ref cooler had bad compatibility with 290/290X

In short they suxx

I want max performance not crippling performance.

How many of you guys running your 290/290X overclocked? Not just for benching but also when playing games. The only issue with the stock referenced cooler is it's loud. My cards before using water block also ran with the stock cooler & they ran just fine. Loud but ran just fine, especially at stock clock.

i once using 290 reference cooler in crossfire (oc with voltage bump a bit) and still can maintain temp below 80c no prob.. but need to use custom fan profile to increase fan usage up to 75%.. the noise?

Yes, even non-referenced cooler, if you overclocked also need to run with custom fan profile. The only difference is noise. Also referenced cooler doing very good job in cooling VRM.

I got 2 sapphire 4870 crossfire till now !! 1 of them died now planning to buy new 1 !
soo the reference coller better cooling in vrm ? I tot custom cooler also got cooling for vrm ??

This post has been edited by ah_fong: Mar 24 2015, 06:31 PM

No throttling moment at all?

mine throttled all the time until rosak

Received my sapphire R9 290 tri-x. Unfortunately, can't play with it yet because my pc still not finish.

Reference R9 290/290X?Have fun with this.


For real,the reference cooler fo the 290 and 290X isn't that good..

Yes, custom cooler also have cooling for VRM but they're not necessarily good.

Also don't quote me out of context. I said "Also referenced cooler doing very good job in cooling VRM.". I didn't say better but "very good job". I know for sure Vaporx & Lightning offer very good cooling for VRM which I may say better than other custom coolers but then these are custom boards with better VRMs. I can't say the same for other custom coolers.

If you run at stock fan profile, sure it may throttling. I use custom fan profile no throttling whatsoever & I have two in my rig. I can maintain both below 80C on the core at stock clock. The only bad thing about them is noise. I'm watercooling anyway, so the noise just for short time.

BTW, anyone with 290/290X custom coolers running card overclocked while gaming, not just benching?

I see, countless thread about the horrible noise and throttling made me think 290s ref cooler = automatic throttle.

I did overclock for a couple of games like AC and pCars.

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Added on
=Update=
Just tried the leaked 15.2 modded driver, framerate control doesn't work for me and VSR max limit is 3840x2160 instead of 3200x1800.


The driver gave me higher DPC count so i'm reverting back to 15.3.1. No TDR or BSOD though.

This post has been edited by Acid_RuleZz: Mar 25 2015, 12:11 AM

want to ask , i just got a r9 290 , but when play games , the temperature is over 90'c due to ultra setting , izzit normal ? should i get water block for it ? and some times it suddenly drop to 20 FPS , and i still using 4 years back system board and processor

reference model? whats your full pc spec?

am3 processor , gigabyte board , forgot jor , but as what i check its normal for a reference gpu ? should i gte a water block for it ?

its normal for reference model.. nothing much you can do about it. you can try underclock a bit to reduce its temp.. or just using custom fan profile like afterburner or trixx to increase its max fan usage. to be specific whats your processor model? that 20fps could be sign of cpu bottlenecking..

but i checked it seem like using this willl lower the temp till 70'c , was thinking change the system board and processor

This post has been edited by TianJian: Mar 25 2015, 10:20 AM

Using watercooling definitely will reduced the temperature drastically, based on my experience when gaming/benchmarking the temperature will be around 50~55 degree