PowerColor LCS R9 290X Watercooled Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 28.02.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the Radeon R9 290X LCS PowerColor has an almost flawless overclocked R9 290X graphics card in its portfolio. The card is fast, does not throttle down like reference cooled models, has a nice watercooled design from EK Water Blocks and a decent factory overclocking. Even the memory is overclocked which is rare thing these days. The cooling performance is on a very competitive level and we very much like the fact that PowerColor decided to equip the card with a BIOS DIP switch just like on the reference card and went for a different BIOS configuration with a default and a overclocked BIOS to chose from. The LCS series comes with an EK-FC R9 290X full-cover water block already mounted and ready to use and a full backplate to prevent bending and protect the card at the same time. |
- Performance
- Watercooling performance - Design - Backplate - Memory Clock - Watercooled - BIOS DIP switch |
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| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| The card is watercooled so the noise level of the graphic itself is 0 dBA, the noise level in this case is depend on the user configuration, pump noise level and radiator fans noise level. | - Water
cooling performance
- Noise levels |
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| Performance | + | - | |
| The overall performance is very good since the LCS model
does not throttle down like the reference cooled R9 290X graphics cards. The factory
overclocking on the GPU and the memory, paired up with a good cooling
solution, make this Radeon R9 290X LCS a bit faster than a
reference Radeon R9 290X. At the default frequency the Powercolor R9
290X LCS is in top of the all our tests except in Crysis 3. Albeit, in
overclocked scenario the graphics card easily to the first place in all gaming and
3DMark benchmarks. We also did a overclocking test with this
graphics cards and we were quite surprised to see
FurMark benchmark being stable for 15 minutes at
1310MHz/1570MHz. As we check on the net its the highest stable result for
R9 290X series under water. A closer look at power consumption reveals that the figures are reasonably not bad as in idle it draws 98 Watts. Under load, it is a different story. The measured 388 Watts is quite something, but this can be expected, since we are looking at the Hawaii GPU which is doing its job underneath the water cooler. When the card is overclcoked to 1200MHz/1500MHz the power consumption is quit higher, 110 Watts in idle and 530 Watts under load with 1.15V for the GPU. The overall Performance-per-Watt is therefore not as competitive as with NVIDIA cards. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| When all things are considered, the Radeon R9 290X LCS from PowerColor is a very good graphics card. Of course, the pricing is also in line with its performance and it costs around 260 Euro more than a reference R9 290X with included 95 euro for the wateblock and 25 euros for the backplate. Compared to the GTX 780 Ti watercooled version which costs a bit more than this card, pricing is just about right. | - Enthusiast | ||
| We gave the Radeon R9 290X LCS from PowerColor 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
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ASUS Radeon R9 290X Matrix Platinum Review
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