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ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC Review

Published by Christian Ney on 10.01.14

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The card

ASUS decided to equip the Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC with the latest revision of their famous DirectCU II cooler. It is exactly the same ASUS put on the GeForce GTX 780 and 780 Ti DirectCU II series, no changes have been made. In this case you get no less than five heatpipes, two have a diameter of six millimeter, two eight millimeter and one features a massive ten millimeter. The heatpipes have been nickel plated and are in direct contact with the GPU core. Soldered to the heatpipes you find the fin stack which is being provided with fresh air via two 95mm fans. The fan closer to the I/O shield is a hybrid axial/radial fan ASUS like to call "CoolTech". They claim that this fan is able to provide a higher airflow than standard axial or radial fans at the same noise level. In case of the second fan you find a standard axial fan. Both fans are being manufactured by Everflow and strangely share the same model name, T129215SU.
Overall the cooler is well made and the finish is on a very reasonable level too. Good thermal paste has been spread all over the core in large quantity but the memory chips don't get active cooling.

Like the reference model, the ASUS DirectCU II OC has a DIP switch to select between two BIOS. Unfortunately the switches aren't labelled. SW1 is silent mode and SW2 is performance mode. There is also no note in the bundled documentation or on the product page on the website. Unlike the reference model, ASUS chose to equip its card with a silent mode BIOS and a performance mode BIOS rather than a normal/uber mode BIOS. In our opinion ASUS made the right choice. We have tested both modes and surprisingly we didn't experience any performance loss using the silent BIOS. The only difference we noticed were regarding the temperatures and fan speeds. In case of the silent BIOS, the fan was always around lowest speed between 20-25%, in this case the GPU temperature was around 90°C. Do not worry, the R9 290X chip can take that. With the performance BIOS on, the card was trying to keep the GPU temperature between 70 and 75°C (fan speed range: 40-50%).

Like most of ASUS' recent high-end cards the PCB has been completely reworked and the power design beefed-up. A closer look at it shows an 8 phase power implementation for the main power design where the GPU gets six (there are five on the reference card) and the memory two phases. The PCB design is looking very much alike the one you get with the R9 280X DirectCU II model.

The main power design MOSFETs are being actively cooled via an aluminium heatsink/thermal pad combo. The manufacturer decided to equip its Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II with both metal reinforcement (located at the top end of the card) and full backplate to prevent bending and protect the card at the same time.
Component wise ASUS makes use of high quality, so called Super Alloy Power, components. Last but not least, located at the rear of the PCB there are several voltage and modification points (VDDCI, MVDD, VDDC, OVCI, OVM, OVC) and the ROG Connect soldering points.

Checking the voltage regulation chip we find a digital multi-phase controller labelled Digi+ ASP1300 for the GPU, and one uP1631P from uPI Semiconductor for the memory.