ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC Review
Published by Hiwa Pouri on 03.04.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the new Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC ASUS has an almost flawless custom R9 graphics card in its portfolio. The card is fast but not as fast as its big brother, the R9 290X, does not throttle like reference models since the DirectCU II cooler does a great job, has a nice design, a decent factory overclock of more than 50 MHz over the reference design and even the memory is overclocked, which is quite rare these days. Thanks to custom PCB and the strong VRM design with three phase more than reference design on GPU as well as the Digi+, a digital phase controller which is controlling eight phases, the new ASUS R9 290 Direct CU II will probably end up to be one of the best R9 290 graphics cards on the market. ASUS has been using the same controller for a long time now and it has been also used on some high-end motherboard in the past. The cooling performance is on a very competitive level and we really liked the fact that ASUS decided to equip the card with a DIP switch but went for a different BIOS configuration, with silent and performance BIOS options. In addition to the backplate ASUS also used a reinforcing bar which adds to the overall quality of the R9 290 DirectCU II OC. |
- Performance
- Cooling performance - Design - colored stickers bundled - Backplate - Memory Clock - Noise levels - BIOS DIP switch |
- Bundle | |
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| Honestly, we are quite positively surprised by this
cooler. In the past we did not agree with several decisions made
regarding fan profiles, but this cooler is excellent and it definitely
can't be compared to any reference cooler. In performance mode (BIOS SW2) temperatures are very good but in this case the graphics card starts to be well audible under load (49.2 dBA). With the silent BIOS (SW1) temperatures are high, and hover around 95°C for the GPU, but the result is a very silent graphics card as the fans do not spin much higher than when the GPU is in idle state. The BIOS DIP switch is really a nice feature here and we would love to see this on all high-end graphics cards. |
- Cooling performance
- Noise levels |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Overall, the performance is very good since the DirectCU
II model does not throttle like the reference cards. The factory overclocking on the
GPU and the memory, paired with the good cooling
solution, make this Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC, a tad bit faster than
the reference Radeon R9 290. A closer look at the power consumption reveals that the figures are reasonably good with 57 Watts in idle. It is 10 Watts lower than the R9 290X Matrix for example. Under load, it is a different story. The measured 421 Watts is quite something, but can also be expected, since there is a Hawaii GPU doing its job underneath the massive cooler. The overall performance/watt is therefore not as competitive as with NVIDIA graphics cards. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| The Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC from ASUS is a very good graphics card. The noise levels with the performance BIOS could be a tad little bit better, but since it is a performance BIOS there is definitely nothing too serious to complain about. Also the pricing is appropriate. This card might cost 45 Euro more than a reference R9 290 but since it is as fast as a lot of other versions, which costs the same or even higher, pricing is just about right. | - Gaming | ||
| We gave the Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC from ASUS 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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