First you need to know your card limit, flashing blindly without knowing the limit is not advisable. You better test it first by using MSI Afterburner, Sapphire Trixx or something similar. What BIOS do you plan to flash?

Put a better cooled card as primary as it usually the first card that loads more than second card. It also depends on your case airflow.

It seems like it's possible to unlock normal Fury at least partially now, from 3584 to 3840 SP. Interesting

With the price nope. I wont buy graphics card over RM1500. The increment over 290X is small at 1920x1080 so I wont upgrade at least not on the same 28nm. I just posted that to poison for those who want to buy Fury

Do you put the framerate limiter or Vsync on? It's common when the GPU is not being fully loaded it's drops down the clock and voltages especially with framerate limiter is on. Enough about bottlenecks already, if the games you play don't give any trouble why should you worry? Metro Last Light is one demanding game when it comes out but even with single 290/X could handle the game well at 1920x1080.

Not gonna lie, the Nano looks amazing for such a size and the performance it expected to deliver. But since my case is larger than standard case putting it inside made it looks awkward

Carizzo is laptop only but they could simply put it on desktop with higher clockspeed and higher TDP. There are Carizzo laptops but like almost all AMD laptops they mostly on cheapo low resolution 14 inch screens, perhaps Intel have something to do with this. Whatever it is it's bad for AMD.

Impressive little card, kudos to AMD for proving that they too can make a decent card that doesn't eat power and in very tiny space. AMD is at an advantage because of HBM but at 28nm and lack of dedicated interposer fab is hurting AMD.

But that power trick is very easy to achieve on any GCN card because AMD puts too high clockspeed on it, thus requiring very high voltage to be stable. I could make my 290X as power saving as GTX 960 but performs much faster than it. I made an experiment already, at 950MHz my card needs mere 1.05V. I don't probe with multimeter or Kill-A-Watt meter but on GPU-Z software reading the VDDC Power In never reach 150W and Power Out never reach over 130W when running 3DMark.

It reach its power target before thermal limit thats why the temperature is low. You can do it even on Hawaii cards.

Stick with whatever driver you fancy. All the new driver really crash when playing GTA V which is annoying so i stick with older driver. Unless the release note states it will benefits the current game I playing or it didnt have any major bugs I usually just stick with older stable driver.

It will work just fine. People overestimate R9 290 power consumption.

It depends, stock cooler one might be as low as RM8xx while custom cooler/board is RM9xx to 1K+ for used ones. My card actually got a buyer but...I really dont want to sell it

After reading a huge thread over overclock.net Im glad I sided with AMD instead. Green team got no more stupid reason to give after much of their fiasco like the dreaded GTX 970 memory partition. I still mad because of it.

If you read AoTS preview from various tech sites you'll see their DirectX 12 and Asynchronous Shading performance decrease instead of increase as compared to DirectX 11. Nvidia been keeping quiet about it. The thread discussed about perhaps nvidia can't really do it because it lacks hardware scheduler (hence the reason why they could reduce a lot of power with the same 28nm lithography), can't really do parallel works because it was meant to do serial work and rely more on driver updates and CPU power to do it.

That's a lot of bull, It was problematic on the game that uses 4GB of VRAM even back then. It stutter like hell when accessing the last 0.5GB partition. When I buy 4GB 256-bit hardware I expects it to have that, not 3.5GB 224-bit with the last bit crippled. With more and more games eating VRAM good luck for all 970 user.

Furthermore it's either you are blind or what, nGreedia been gimping their Gameworks titles on AMD cards, remember Crysis 2 excessive tessellation on road divider and invisible sea under maps? What about Witcher 3 Hairworks? That doesn't include any other games like PCars and other PhysX games.

I would like to see the source of where did nvidia say thei fixed the GTX 970 fiasco.

That is one bold statement, not everyone is rich enough to upgrade within few femtosecond. Unless that is the mentality of the owner of the card to their beloved company

At first Im tempted to buy Polaris but since its delayed for long I no longer bother with it. Twice I've been put my 290x on Garage Sales but pull out both time, I glad I did that. 290X most likely handle any new games at fullHD resolution for at least another year by the look of things. Even if Polaris is on time with the release I'll wait because each new process toom time to mature and I dont want to be a 'beta' tester.

Malaysia mark up price is bullcrap. When I simply search at Amazon the prices of hardware there is a lot cheaper than local shops. With Amazon Prime you can get Sapphire R9 Nano for less than RM2k, at the local shops? the cheapest I saw is RM23xx, some fetch to 26xx (same brand). MSI GTX 970 TwinFrozr V is RM13xx, in our beloved country? RM1799, even RM19XX on one shop! You can eat a whole month with that saving!

Price is crappy no matter what. Upper limit for high end card is RM2K IMO, over that it's just too much. Unless you uncle benny rich or stringfellow rich

No, not really related to driver overhead or draw calls. Driver overhead is higher on all AMD cards, while draw calls isn't so much for old DirectX games. I read that one of the reason is due to it's slow speed first gen HBM that let it down. Also, the front end and back end of Fiji is basically the same as Hawaii (same number of ACE units, same ROP count), only the shader gets massive boost and slight boost in texture units (some minor tweaks from Tonga like delta compression and stuff) so unless you can get a good deal on one, or really need one for SFF build I'd rather wait for the next big thing.

What I mean is because Fiji ROP and ACE count is the same as Hawaii the difference between the two is miniscule if its limited in that category. Im on my phone right now but you can read Techreport review of Fiji, page 4 if Im not mistaken testing Beyond3D suite. There it shows what Fiji is similar to Hawaii. I dont mentioned ACE count is a bottleneck, but because its similar between the two it make the card performs close to Hawaii. Just look at Ashes of Singularity demo, dont look at Fury X vs 980Ti, but look at 290/390 performs with async compute on.

Regarding the slow HBM he term is kinda like big highway but slow car. If im not wrong I read it somewhere in Beyond3D or overclock.net forum but cant find any link currently.

Back then it was fun changing GPU because of new features and the speed improvement we get our money's worth unlike today where even old 7970 is good enough for gaming at 1080p. With the advancement of DirectX requires pixel/vertex shader which makes old card slow to emulate vertex shader on software slow and no pixel shader effect whatsoever forcing people to upgrade. Hate nvidia back then since the old GeForce 4 MX don't have hardware pixel shader while old Radeon 8500 support them.

I'm not even 30's yet I feel old. Hardware nowadays feels boring. No more crazy overclocking on cheap PSU/mobo/RAM and stock HSF