I had a GTX 280 and that card could get REALLY hot even when adjusting the fan profile, it burned out eventually. Not the most silent card. I also pushed my HD 4890 with it's stock cooler to 1025 mHz core and adjusted the fan speed, so it got loud with the stock cooler. But then again I have a 5.1 setup and a dedicated sound card so I like to crank the volume up... hard. The R9 290 "noise issue" is a non-issue for me personally. To be honest I'm waiting for the ones with aftermarket cooling solutions to reduce the FPS variance. The nVidia cards even with their good heatsink/fan combo are too expensive for the relative performance offered.
If you crank up the speaker volume to drown out the noise then your dedicated sound card is pointless. It doesn't matter if your SNR is 120dB or 80dB when your noise floor is 50dB.
Sometimes you use your GPU for something that doesn't involve the volume being 100% of the time at 100%, blaring. Also, turning up the volume to make for your GPU(s!) squealing is a great way to need even louder volume settings by 35 and hearing aids at 45.
And by chance, what do you do during the quiet periods every game has? Just not hear the ambiance? What's the point of a great audio subsystem (TrueAudio) then? Or do you just "MAN THE VOLUME KNOB!" turning it up and down like a madman?
Wouldn't it just be easier if AMD gave a damn about their cooling and voltage controls?
To further expand this point, it looks like the harvesting is done with two variables: voltage and functional units. AMD doesn't want to go beyond the 300W limit of the PCI-E spec and form the looks of things, running an 290X at the 290 voltages + fan speed would push it over.
You would see it if Titan and the 780 ran at different voltages. But they don't.
The R9 290 runs 100-200 mV higher than the 290X. Even without a clock speed difference this would mean higher temps and higher wattage on the cheaper card. It's likely that they never intended for this to happen but issues with yields forced their hand with lower binned parts needing higher voltages.
It's amazing how much engineering goes into designing these chips, and then they can't engineer a decent cooling solution.
Or, more likely, they figured they would save some money on the cooler because people just look at framerates in the benchmarks. I'm with you Ryan. I can't stand loud computers and there's really no need in this day and age. Luckily I'm sure some aftermarket coolers or 3rd part cards will ditch the reference cooler and put something better on.
In fact one of the things I hated most about my last AMD card - the 4850 - was that the fan speed under load was quite loud, but even worse it was constantly adjusting the speed. Up down up down up down up up up down down. It was extremely annoying for sure. My 560 Ti doesn't do any of that.
I agree and I also want to thank Ryan for his conclusion. Sure, there are people who can stand the loud card, but this is a $400-$550 piece of equipment. You shouldn't have to settle for that price. Some one needed to stand up for this, and I'm glad Ryan did. Anything less than a non-recommendation would not initiate change, as apparently all his previous reviews that criticized loudness but still recommended the card did nothing. Even him lauding the reference NVidia 250W heatsink for the past year did not get the point across.
I strongly agree that Ryan has the right idea behind his reviews. 99+% of people who buy a graphics card want it to work out of the box without modifications, and recommending a card based upon requiring it to be modified is insane. Ryan, also thank you for using "quiet" as the default setting and the basis for judging the card's performance. I completely agree that the majority of people who buy these cards will not think twice about what the BIOS switch does and will leave their cards in the default "quiet" setting.
There are plenty of people in these R9 290/X review threads who argue that "well, you can just get an aftermarket heatsink/water cooling" and "just wait for the custom coolers." The problem is that you rate a product on what it is, not what it can be. There will be reviews on the custom cooled cards eventually, but for now Ryan's conclusion is completely valid. Adding aftermarket custom cooling is not "easy" for the majority of people. In an enthusiast forum it may seem normal but it is far too advanced for 90+% of people who buy this card. Plus that aftermarket cooling costs at least $50, and when you consider that a properly cooled R9 290 is $450 (or $475 with an Accelero Xtreme III as recommended in other forums), the R9 290's value proposition is eliminated.
While a lot of people don't want to do aftermarket, I think you are completely off in your 90% estimation. This is a 400 dollar card, not a mid level or entry level card.
The problem with aftermarket cooling is the fact you have to do it yourself, and lets face it people aren't the brightest star in the sky, engineering your own custom watercooling loop is hard for professionals given the total equation of the parts(that is when it is built properly), and I imagine 98% of the people won't crack open a thermodynamics book to actually learn what they should be using instead of what they are willing to buy.
Watercooling is not rocket science. There are many basic calculators online to help you figure out how much radiator space you need for the wattage you're dumping into it. When in doubt, just get a larger radiator. A quality pump like the MCP655 can easily handle three triple 120mm radiators by itself. One pump, one or two radiators, some tubing, and you're done (reservoir is optional).
"The problem is that you rate a product on what it is, not what it can be. "- I agree wholeheartedly, If that was the case a car's value would skyrocket the moment people develop parts for it to compete in higher brackets, and lets face it, more often than not peole will buy the Ferrari if they can afford it versus paying 30k for a supra or skyline and sinking 75-150k to make it perform like the former mentioned, and really not be the same at all due to the engineering limitations that one cannot change.
I agree with pretty much anything you said here. And what I really would have liked from AMD, if they didn't want to afford a better cooler, is to just offer an alternative: e.g. the already mentioned excellent Accelero Xtreme III keeps the 290 at maximum clock speed constantly, even with its fans at 7 V.. at a noise level even less than regular cards at idle. Sure, it needs a 3rd slot. But from my point of view such a cooler is what these cards really need. Otherwise all the work AMD put into their silicon is almost wasted.
We can get the Accelero Xtreme III for ~40€, so I could easily imagine AMD getting them for ~20€ in massive quantities. Would it be so hard to offer such a version from the start.. and while doing so avoid pretty much all the negative press?!
BTW: I had a 9800GTX with reference blower, a HD4870 with some alternative cooler and a HD6950 with unlocked shaders. None of thme lasted longer than a few hours with stock cooling in my PC, just totally unbearable. I used Accelero S1 for the first two and a Termalright Shaman for the latter. A difference like night and day! Currently I'm running a KFA² GTX660Ti with a power target if 108 W - at that point the stock cooler is fine (even at at 130 W).
I have to say NVIDIA has a far more better reference cooling system. The R9 290 is indeed too loud, and the voltage is ridiculously high, which, in my opinion, should be responsible for the high power consumption and noise level. I personally own a 7970ge vapour-x card, the stock voltage of which is 1.256v. The card is loud(but not insanely loud). After modifying some bios, I found that I can lower the voltage since I didn't need very high frequencies. Then I changed the voltage from 1.256v to 1.143v. The whole world became quite without losing performance.
That and to this day GPUs are still exposed chip and not protected by heat spreader like CPUs are. Reminds me the horrors of installing heatsinks on Duron/Thunderbirds when they still were exposed chip. I am not willing to risk chipping/destroying the GPU when I need to pull the OEM heatsink off and putting the aftermarket one on.
Noise is as import to me as it seems to be to Ryan. The last time I used a video card with a reference cooler on it was... My Voodoo 5. Every card since then has either promptly had a a quieter aftermarket cooler added to it, or came with one pre-fitted.
It will be interesting to see what the customized 290s look like.
I don't think that the cooler is bad because of a money issue. The great thing with that stock cooler is that it push the hot air outside the box, at the back of the case. Aftermarket cooler are way better, but they don't do that, so, they are extremly dependant of the case cooling performance. Most of people don't see that, because people testing cards are poeples who care and have a good case cooling already, so aftermarket cooler are always better. But if the reference cooler was more dependant of the case cooling, I am pretty sure AMD would get a lot of burned card back in warrenty, installed in poorly cooled case. Are standard low budget acase are worse and worse every year sicne everybody like those tiny shiny micro ATX case.
I know what you are saying. I still have my reference XFX 4870 that I got for a good price new back in 2008 sitting in my old PC, and loathed playing games back then because then I'd need to turn the fan speed up to keep it from overheating. The main reason why I went with a 770 over another loud AMD card this time around. I'd rather spend 30-40 dollars extra for a card that isn't going to drive me nuts every time the computer is running.
Its time AMD should learn few things. Everyone wants a all round card. AMD is giving performance for a great price by putting cooling, noise and power on line. GTX 480 was one of the hottest and HD6990 card was one of the nosiest card ever produced. Nvidia learned that thing and made card less hot and noisy in next generations. But AMD is still putting their issues on board partners and not releasing good reference models. Price of Nvidia cards are high because they are well equipped and build properly. And if they will charge high for that then its obvious as its scoring in all departments.
I own a AMD HD7970 card but dont like the things what is happening in R9 edition cards.
No, NVidia does price gouge along with board partners, simply put the chips in most cases are exactly the same, with disabled units attached or lower frequency clocks on the RAM, essentially you pay for Binn sifted parts and all around NVidia and ATI using sub par alloys like nickel plated aluminum heatsinking instead of using copper all around, which in the case of any card over 500$ is flat out a disgrace. Instead of pushing the industry forward they stifle it over generations that offer marginal increases, less than 10%, in order to reap higher profit margins, 680 to 770 is a great example of this.
You are wrong on two counts. First, it is by no means cheap to design a new chip; think tens of millions of dollars. To design a new architecture, you need even more than that. Second, you forget that silicon process advances have slowed significantly. There's only so much you can do when you can't move to a smaller node as has been responsible for the yearly performance improvements in the past.
Sure, NVidia could design a new chip to fit between GK110 and GK104, but think of the economics. They would be selling the chip for $300-$400, a very small portion of the overall graphics market. It would have a 20-25% performance improvement at most over existing products, significantly discouraging upgrades. And it would be obsolete in less than a year when the new 20nm process came out, which would significantly limit the ability to recoup cost. Taking a smaller margin on GK110 (aka GTX 780), performing extreme binning on GK104 (aka GTX 770), or just completely omitting the $400 target is a much safer proposition than designing a new chip to fit that market.
The only reason AMD designed Hawaii is because 20nm was delayed and the company couldn't push Tahiti to any higher performance level. If 20nm was coming in January, we would never see the Hawaii GPU because AMD could never sell enough chips to make it profitable before it was obsolete.
Noun 1. price gouging - pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is available
How is NVidia price gouging? You're setting the market price in your mind, but you don't have the power to make your fantasy a reality, and therefore NVidia price gouges? People go into an enterprise to turn a profit, and throughout their history NVidia has usually been profitable. But their profits have not been excessive, nor have they been based primarily on market relationships (e.g., Microsoft using Windows to foist Office). They have been profitable because they have been well-managed, and have produced successful, competitive products. People who complain "Oh, XY graphics card is too expensive. The companies are price gouging" sound like children who want, want, want but don't understand, or care to understand, how things work, but simply try to use a bully pulpit to get their way. Some people want the best graphics card that is out there, and are willing to pay a premium for it. The demand is there. When NVidia, or any other company, is in the position to tap into that demand, they will do so, because it's a high-margin segment.
As far as your assertion that the chips are the same, and NVidia and AMD are (my paraphrase, you used "price gouge") "gaming" the market, one must understand the structure of the industry. First of all, realize there is demand for graphics processors at various wide-ranging price points. A GPU company ideally would like to tap into all parts of said market. Next, realize that a large part of chip designers' costs are tied up in the design and validation of an architecture, which creates an economy of scale. Designing separate architectures, one each for a $100 card, for a $150 card, for a $200 card, etc, is terribly inefficient and such cards would be prohibitively expensive and uncompetitive. At the same time, if, for instance, it designed one architecture and released one product at, say, $200, it would probably have a very good product at that price point assuming everyone was willing to pay $200. But any competitor which was able to provide value at $150 or less or $250 or more will capture most of the market, and our company again would be losing out on the economy of scale, because it spent all that money designing a chip for a very narrow market segment; The price of its $200 chip would have to be increased just to attempt to break even to try to pay for the R&D expenses, because its competitor could spread those costs over a wider volume output. So what could be a solution? A solution is to sort of "zip" or "tar" the segments together in the design process, and then decouple them again when delivering individual products, assigning design costs unequally across the segments. For instance, Intel might see two markets, one which uses hyperthreading, and one which does not. There is a certain cost associated with developing hyperthreading, and they are only going to design one architecture. So they design that architecture with hyperthreading, then enable it for the one segment and don't enable it for the other. I think that in this case one could think about the cost structure for the hyperthreading-enabled chip as having the design costs of the hyperthreading as part of its total cost, while the cost structure of the non-enabled chip could leave the hyperthreading design cost out.
Another way to hit a range of market segments is by chip binning. There is a distribution of the quality of chips produced by a particular manufacturing process. Chips that perform at X quality or above are placed in the highest bin, and account for Y% of the total production. They are scarce because to get Z chips with at least X quality, one must make at least Z/(Y%) total chips. Intuitively, these X-quality chips therefore cost more to make.
As far as what you say about "sub-par alloys," your statement that it is "flat out a disgrace" to have aluminum heatsinks is based on what knowledge of the cost and benefit of various materials for heatsinks? I think your accusation that NVidia and AMD are not truly competing, but trying to hold back innovation to reap higher profits is unfounded and ridiculous. The reason generation-over-generation performance increases have lessened is because the GPU industry is maturing, and innovation gets increasingly difficult. In addition, semiconductor processes are not currently scaling heat-wise or cost-wise like they did years ago.
Jesus, your post is downright offensive, Yojimbo. You discount everything the previous poster said (most of which I agree with 100%, by the way) by arguing that he doesn't have the depth of knowledge that's required to make assertions, but then you back up your own claims in no way whatsoever.
One doesn't have to be a genius to correlate transistor counts, die sizes, lead counts, and materials into approximate manufacturing costs. Once done, you can see that NVidia is basically pricing the one product all over the place. How can you possibly explain the price of the Titan, when the 780TI rolls off the block a few months later at a drastically reduced price? Anyone with a little common sense will probably call it price gouging - the same thing that explains why the double-precision functionality on all the consumer boards are intentionally disabled with drivers.
At least Yojimbo provided a reasoned explanation for his argument (which actually provide a good reason for the phenomenon you are complaining about in your post.) You just claim that anyone with any common sense should agree with you, OBVIOUSLY.
Nvidia prices based on market demand, not based on fantasy numbers that come from enthusiasts posting on forums. If I price a video card at $1000 and it's sold out all the time, that actually means _I didn't price it high enough)_. If people thought Nvidia's cards were too expensive, they wouldn't buy them, and yet Nvidia controls far more than a majority market share of the desktop video card market.
Why would ANY company say 'oh... people would pay $1000 for our card, but that just seems unfair, I guess we will price it at $600 and then when we cant supply nearly enough of them and people are angry they cant buy one, we can make ourselves feel better about the fact that we set the price fairly."
I mean, what? Everyone seems to think that the best video card has some "reasonable" price and it should never exceed that. It's nonsense. Price is based on demand. The reason that AMD cards are cheaper than Nvidia cards is because they MUST be cheaper in order to compete. AMD is technologically behind Nvidia in most generations. When you show up to a market 8 months late, you have to compete on price.
No company competes on price if they can better compete on features or performance. Everyone would chase high margins if they could.
copper is good a conducting heat, not so much at dissipating it.. That's why the heatpipes are almost always nickel plated copper, and the heatsink's are light, aluminium which dissipates better.
Also Pure copper would make the card very heavy and it would bow/flex lesser motherboards.
I think that the reality is that we're approaching a limit to what can be done to cooling a power hungry PCI-E card within the official spec constraints. GPU's are chronically power limited: most of these designs have some clock speed and voltage headroom to go a bin or two higher but they'd be well outside of the PCI-E spec. Something has to give and well, the PCI-e spec doesn't list a maximum decibel level for noise a card can make. With 20 nm and future processes really only improving transistor density and not the power profile, things are not going to be
At this point I'd like to see some experimentation with putting GPU's on to motherboards so that they could utilize a more robust cooling solution. Set things up mechanically to allow users to use current socket 2011 coolers and water blocks.
Its all in the alloys they use in heat sink materials, copper is the best in thermo performance per price, I mean if you give me a brick of silver or gold I can make you a proper heatsink. Every metal's value is determined by its industrial application not by what women like to wear, that is the misconception, and of course availability or abundance on earth of the substance, and last but not least, the F@#king A$$holes that buy the metals as an investment and essentially stockpile the $hit because in reality they serve no purpose than screwing over industries and products that rely on said metals, and in turn screw the population that relies on the products. I think I made the point, we get sub par hardware issues for premium prices because some people can't make or keep money unless its weighted in a safe somewhere.
Just FYI, silver is the most thermally conductive element, but it's only about 5% better than copper. For all practical purposes there is no reason to build a computer heatsink out of anything more expensive than copper. Gold is only about 2/3 as thermally conductive as copper and aluminum is about 1/2 as thermally conductive as copper. There would be no point in building a gold heatsink over a copper one. It would look cool, but compared to copper it would be insanely heavy (over two times as heavy; imagine a 3kg graphics card) and perform worse.
AMD could have let the voltage levels go up and down to match the actual power required by the card. Instead, they focused on the fans because that's the easier one to add in after-the-fact. Because I believe the card was meant to have a lower voltage level and it wouldn't hit performance that could beat the 780, so they figured they'd go loud and hot and pray it held together.
This thing is all duct tape and chopsticks, MacGyver'ed together. That's why the cooler is so inadequate to the task it is given. They didn't expect to be fielding such a hot and loud card. But management decided that actual performance (not performance per watt or performance per decibel) was infinitely more marketable.
They were probably right, but the cost to my sanity is worth far more than the differences between the R9 290 and the 780.
If you hold out hope that the custom-cooled versions of this will bring it down to sane levels, I hope you are right, too. I think that some custom versions of this card could bring it under control if they reduce the voltage levels along with their custom coolers.
I really wish AMD had a great blower design to go with all those open-air cooler cards to come.
If I were in the market for a high-performance graphics card, I'd never buy these cards and use the stock coolers.
These cards are making people seriously consider graphics card aftermarket air cooling, which is pretty sad. Or maybe not. I'm kind of curious about e-tailer sales data for Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme III, Gelid Icy Vision Rev. 2, Prolimatech MK-26, etc. Recent spike, or is this actually overblown a bit?
No the smart person will buy the hydro copper EVGA NVidia cards if they want to go that route, as its less work in the long run and EVGA assumes the responsibility if anything is wrong with the water block itself, and I'm sure there is an ATI retail version from 1 of the companies. but anybody buying the highest end single GPU solution form either company in most likelihood is also a little insane enough to also use a 250-650$ case, with a 300-600$ motherboard.........you get the picture, In all likelihood they are running custom loops.
Ryan I agreed with both your original conclusion and the amended one here. For 90% of potential customers, there has to be a good balance between performance, power draw, and fan noise.
Many people on the forums dislike your conclusion because they're comparing your recommendation with regards to acoustic profiles on your current setup to past reviews of different cards on different setups. One thing that many of those (who disagreed) is that they aren't accounting for the expectation that comes with increasing the bar of cooling performance over the course of several generations of graphics cards.
You have a choice between restaurant A and restaurant B. Both offer the same quality food and nearly the same menu. Restaurant A, though, has slower service (less "exclusive features) and also has obnoxious 24/7 construction going on INSIDE the restaurant. It is, however, 20% cheaper than restaurant B.
If those are your only two choices to eat out, would you choose one of those restaurants or just not eat out?
The issue with this analogy is that you sensationalize the 290's acoustics as "obnoxious 24/7 construction", which I'm sure NO ONE would want in their restaurant. The reality of the matter is that some people simply do not think that the cards are all that loud while others do. A better analogy would be if Restaurant A has music playing inside the Restaurant while restaurant B doesn't. Some people wouldn't mind the music while others would.
I agree the 290 is too loud. So i'm simply going to wait for custom cooling designs to appear before i pick up a couple of these cards. It may increase the price slightly, but even if it then costs the same as a GTX 780 it will still offer better performance at that price.
I have to agree that noise should be an important consideration. I'm very happy with my 7950 because it stays very quite no matter what I throw at it. I did play around with overclocking it and honestly the small increase in performance was not worth the increase in the noise from the fan needing to run faster. If I were to not have done any homework and went out and bought a 290 only to discover my most modern up to date graphics beast was as loud as a freight train, I'd have been super pissed. Bottom line, there are definitely those of us out that who do care about acoustics and do agree that a modern GPU should run reasonable quite.
As I already commented on the original review, nobody has a problem with acoustics when AMD does this, when the 480gtx came out, everyone had a rather strong opinion that the card was ridiculous. Of course, AMD has the value argument on their side, which nvidia rarely has.
If the result for this is amd abandons bad blowers its super. Its about time.
If the result is users losing an ability to flip a switch and change profile to their personal preferences its a loss.
If the result is nv or amd beeing more carefull about using new technologies to controll power to maximize performance instead of a fixed core freq its a loss.
I know noise is personal. I own a very silent card that most can not even hear in idle. I unplug it entirely when i dont game. My dishwasher is the most silent on the market. My car is silent.
I simply don't buy anything that doesn't have an open-air cooler now. I used to have a reference HD 6970, and that was simply too loud for me. It was so bad (in my opinion) that I modded it with an Arctic accelero cooler, and was really happy with it after that. I understand the argument that open air coolers spill hot air into the chassis, but that has been a complete non-issue. A chassis with good airflow and a graphics card with the largest open-air cooler you can get has proven to be a very good solution to me.
I say all of this to make this point: I'm not concerned about how loud a reference blower card is, since I would always buy one with a much quieter custom cooler.
Possibly, but it seems open air coolers always have much more potential... It's kind of natural after all, how do most enthusiasts cool their CPU? Big open air tower cooler. I don't see why we should favor blowers just to make up for bad PC cases.
Ryan, I'm glad you're soliciting feedback like this, it's noted and appreciated. With regards to the importance of acoustics, I think you'll find two major camps which diverge pretty heavily. Prefacing with a few points, obviously there will be *some* simple, raw noise level at which point it's unacceptable to anyone with hearing, the sort of profile sometimes found in components designed 100% purely for datacenter/industrial use with no humans around (or at least no humans not equipped with high grade ear protection). Also, I don't think you've formally designed a test for this yet, but it's worth noting too that the quality of the noise matters, not merely the decibels. Certain types of whines, high pitches, patterns, and so on can be vastly more annoying even at a low level then simple white noise, and decibel level alone wouldn't necessarily capture that. So with that aside:
First camp is clearly what you fall into: users who are interested in primarily stock usage with speakers or open backed headphones, and/or in an environment with others around, for whom total system acoustics is a really, really important consideration. If it's loud to any real degree then it could range from immersion breaking to flat-out useless.
Second camp though consists of both users who go heavily custom or those like me with higher environmental tolerances. WRT the first, let's be honest: even though $400 isn't super ultra highest end, and even when the performance is really, really a good value, it's still a really rarified and self-selected market. While the average person never thinks about custom loops or third-party coolers or whatever, a buyer of a $350+ card, any $350+ card, is not the average person and I suspect there is a vastly higher incidence of customization there. For those users a good water loop for example can handle pretty much any level of heat and can do so quite quietly with the right components, so the real limiting factor is whatever limits the silicon itself has. A really solid card with a crap reference cooler they'd never use anyway is perfect. Also, while this is more the future don't forget about newer cable standards: with the kind of range we're going to be able to get from stuff like optical TB, it'll become more practical to have a system in a completely different place from the desk.
To the second I'll use myself as an example. My own computerspace is physically isolated, and while I have a decent sound system I'm using IEMs (Shure SE535s), which have a key selling point of great passive isolation. My phone calls are VoIP so my system alerts me and I can reply without taking them off, I don't get many deliveries but I've been working on wiring that to my LAN too. So it simply takes a comparitively much higher level of noise before I can even hear it, let alone care. All else being equal I'd pick a quieter system, and I definitely care about the noise profile, but the balance of accousts/performance will tend to weight more heavily towards the latter, that's one of the balances of my own use habits.
So I agree with you wanting to encourage AMD and Nvidia in particularly to keep a lid on noise, but at the high-end enthusiast level there certainly appears to be a significant group with different tolerances, either because of how they work or because of how they customize and build or both.
"While the average person never thinks about custom loops or third-party coolers or whatever, a buyer of a $350+ card, any $350+ card, is not the average person and I suspect there is a vastly higher incidence of customization there."
But that's purely a speculation on your part though. I generally spend more than $400 on video cards (though I usually upgrade once every three years or so) and I've never thought about water cooling. Furthermore, for people who have a decent audio system, noise do matter.
>But that's purely a speculation on your part though.
No, it's not pure speculation. The objective fact is that products are being offered, which in turn means there is a market. Those companies aren't charities, if there was no money to be made the products would not last, but they have. Going by general trends period as well as normal economic logic, extrapolating that most of that sort of thing is going to the high end is not much of a stretch. If you want to argue though that 3rd party coolers, full loops and so on are being bought by people who get $100 cards then go for it.
>Furthermore, for people who have a decent audio system, noise do matter.
As I said, this is not necessarily true. Next time try reading the whole thing before responding. IEMs are absolutely "decent" or beyond decent, even before getting into $1000+ full custom plugs. A decent input source like an O2+ODAC and a set of good IEMs will be competitive with any headset on the market. Whether you want significant isolation or not and whether you like something in your ears or not is a matter of personal preference, but the fact remains that a significant number of people use an audio setup where room noise is massively reduced, with all the pluses and minuses that entails.
Again, you offer no solid facts to support your argument. In your original post you made it sound like $350+ video cards are ultra highend and are out of reach for the 'casual gamers.' That's my problem with your argument.
>>A decent input source like an O2+ODAC and a set of good IEMs will be competitive with any >>headset on the market.
I have a Sennheiser HD800 (which is an 'open' headphone), along with Luxman P-1u and PS Audio Perfectwave DAC (I usually do switch to Xonar STX for gaming though), so I have a fairly decent system, and yes, I do game on that system.
>Again, you offer no solid facts to support your argument.
Again, you completely ignore it all. However, if you want solid numbers then we can do that too.
>In your original post you made it sound like $350+ video cards are ultra highend and are out of reach for the 'casual gamers.'
They are, and if you think otherwise then you really, REALLY need to get out of your bubble. For hard numbers we now have a really massive, wide based one: the Steam Hardware Survey (found here: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey). Go take a look at it, I don't think a lot of the type who would visit Anandtech at all have any idea exactly how out there they are. Of Steam's userbase, nearly TEN PERCENT is on INTEGRATED GRAPHICS. And not new Iris stuff either, but horrible old HD 3000/4000 crap. Look for $350-400+ cards (new, some of what we see there might be used/clearance if it's not current gen). You have to go down 7 places to find the GTX 670, at 1.48%. The next one, the 680, is another 16 places down at 1.09%, and it's all downhill from there. The 570 1.04%, the 580 is 0.72%, the 770 clocks in at a glorious 0.60%, and the 780 is too small to even make the top 60. AMD does even worse.
That is the reality: maybe 6-7% of the PC gaming market goes for these total, and an even tinier fraction are getting them within a generation of release.
>so I have a fairly decent system, and yes, I do game on that system.
I'm not sure what your point is with this. Of course open systems, or speakers, can be good also. That's what Ryan is using too. But you asserted that any "decent audio system" was very sensitive to noise, which is wrong.
>> I'm not sure what your point is with this. Of course open systems, or speakers, can be good >> also. >> But you asserted that any "decent audio system" was very sensitive to noise, which is wrong.
My point is that a good open system (open headphones or near-field/Mid-range monitors) will always beat an IEM system. Now, a great CIEM like the 1plus2 would shrink the gap I admit, but those still wouldn’t beat an open system. What you consider to be a ‘decent’ audio system isn’t decent enough for me and others.
>> Look for $350-400+ cards… to find the GTX 670, at 1.48%. The next one, the 680, is another >> 16 places down at 1.09%, and it's all downhill from there… That is the reality: maybe 6-7% of >> the PC gaming market goes for these total, and an even tinier fraction are getting them within >> a generation of release.
And what percentage of those users have their cards on a water loop? Look, I generally agree that people who buy higher end cards are more willing to go with an aftermarket cooling solution, but I’m thinking you’re significantly overestimating their numbers. At any rate, don’t bother to reply, I’m not going to spend any more of my time talking with someone who’s so narrow minded. I think you’re the one that living in a bubble lol.
While I agree with your general sentiments about IEM, I don't think they're even remotely competitive with the better open air headphones when itcomes to sound stage and positioning... Which is kinda crucial for a lot of types of gaming. Same for closed headphones really. In any case, custom loop WC is an extreme niche within a niche. If it wasn't we'd see a lot more cards sold with WC blocks pre-installed, or cards sold with no cooling... CPUs are sold with no cooling solution after all (OEM SKU etc), so it's hardly a liability issue.
>I don't think they're even remotely competitive with the better open air headphones when itcomes to sound stage and positioning... Well, I think you're full of it. I'm also suspicious of anyone who uses terms like "sound stage" since that smells of audiophile. If you are a sane person instead though then my apologies.
>In any case, custom loop WC is an extreme niche within a niche. That was merely one example, there are other aftermarket solutions too (of course, mostly we'll just see custom coolers shipped via non-ref designs in short order). I wasn't asserting that it was some majority of the market or anything of the sort. Rather, Ryan expressed surprise that there was that vocal a response from people with very different views. I was simply offering one perspective on why that was. Yes it's a niche, but as I said I suspect it's bigger (though still small) at the high end level, which these cards definitely are, and even more so probably a higher percentage are the kind of person who would love and read AT.
Have you actually tried comparing open air headphones vs IEM? I'm curious why you *think* I'm full of it... I'm not an audiophile, at least I don't think, but I do frequent audiophile boards in order to get a good value for my money (you inherently have to suss out a lot of hype and bs from the facts tho).
I game with a pair of Beyerdynamic DT880 right now, and a Xonar STX, hardly high end by many people's standards (specially an audiophile). The pair works insanely better than most of the headsets I've tried tho, let alone IEM. I've tried Audio Technica's lower end models but the bass was just too weak, I've triedsome Sennheisers too.
I've got a pair of Etymotic hf5 IEM that I quite like (they retail for like $125+ but I got them during a sale for like $60), they're not even in the same realm when it comes to gaming but they're brilliant for music. I've tried some pretty good Philips Fidelio S which were a bit better than the Ety though still not on the level of the Beyers.
I wouldn't spend more than $300 on a pair of headphones, half that for anything portable that's more at risk (though the build quality and warranty on my V-moda M-80 was well worth $160); but I also do like to try out different stuff. I wanna try out Philips' X1 and Mad Dog planars. Not sure if that makes me an audiophile in your eyes but audio is just as important as video and I've learned in time that $300 on headphones or a display will last me way longer than $300 on any internal PC component (though I'll still spend up to that much per GPU for Eyefinity/Surround CF/SLI).
Cables are all from Monoprice btw. ;) Oh and I'll use Dolby Headphone processing on the STX (or not) depending on the game/engine, works better with some than others... I do think it helps with accurately positioning sounds at times tho (wouldn't bother with extra sound processing otherwise).
Impulses is right… please do yourself a favor and go do some research on this topic in places like Head-Fi or Gearslutz. You are really showing how little you actually know about this.
I have been gaming since the Atari 2600 days. I have owned just about every console released in the US. I also have been a PC gamer for a long time as well. As systems have gotten more powerful the noise has always gone up, whether console or PC. As an engineer out of NC State, the thermodynamics of the whole system has gotten more and more important. Last week, my son found the limit of his laptop, which has been reduced to scrap, due to the heat issue from it's gpu. (amazing how Minecraft and Terraria can get the igpu fired up) The heat/noise/power trifecta will reduce the life of any silicon, Red Ring of Death cost me 5 xbox360.
While I full recognize I am in the minority, I could careless in the pc realm about noise on a gpu. I mod my system regardless of what I get. Air cooling has been insufficient for at least the last 5 years, if not longer, whether it was CPUs back in the Pentium Netburst days, or gpus now. CPUs have gotten better due to shifting priorities and abilities, to the point where gpus have taken over the CPUs in priority. This simply a shift in PC/tablet/smartphone space, where gaming is the defining measure of ability. GPUs will not be an easy fix, as CPUs have been.
Having said that, I game on a mini itx board, in a Liana Li Q-25b case, and a MSI 7970 GHz edition. It functions as my, server, htpc, a hyperv firewall, and gaming rig. It has to be stable/reliable(server), and quiet(htpc). I run a water cooling on the CPU and GPU, to an external box under the case, and the air cooling in the q25 cools the HD, ssd, and tuners quietly. The water cooler is dead quiet as well. It improves the life of the components greatly and solves the heat/noise issue. I only upgrade when I can get a water block for the gpu.
The only thing I see that will help this situation, is a desktop version on endure/optimus. that shifts the duties out more evenly and dynamically according to power usage across silicon. And that is only for help in light to medium duties over air cooling. For me, the power/heat/noise issue is a non issue for me.
For me noise is an important point when dealing with a GPU - I used several aftermarket coolers on my cards from ArticCooling, Thermalright and Prolimatek in the past. Currently I m running a GTX570 Windforce from GB with a modded BIOS because GB screwed it up. The cooler is great it produces good thermals under idle and full load, but the thing was that the idle noise was unacceptable for me - it wasnt that loud but I could here the GPU when it was idle and I use a good case. GB in their wisdom just set the fans to 40% speed on idle and tools like Afterburner couldnt change that, that only left the option of a bios mod. Now my card is running at 20% fanspeed on idle and still stays between 35-40°C but I cant here it anymore.
I can understand the debate and different opinions about noise under load but if a GPU is audible idling while I surf the web, write mails or work with office - FAIL. If a manufacturer isnt able to manage that today in a time where we have multiple clockspeeds and voltages compared to 10 years ago where hardware was running at fixed settings he deserves to be criticized.
Acoustics are very important for me. With my latest build, I specifically tried to design a rather quiet computer. I, however, am not a hardcore gamer (mostly what I play is Civilization V), and look for a video card around $150, not the $300+ cards discussed in this article. Ideally, I'd like it to be completely silent, but I accept that when I game there is going to be more noise than otherwise; I definitely want it managed, though.
i think it would be in amd's benifit to downclock both 290 and 290x... and market to buyers specificly stating "has the POTENTIAL to be highly OVERCLOCKED." this would give the general public a challenge and help the buying of the card. as is, it is too hot, and loud for novice buys! Please guys think about my statement!!
How loud is loud is relative and subjective beyond the numbers. The reviewer says he uses headphones while gaming. So the audio from the game is blasting his ears but the card is too loud. Really? Okay then. If you have a decent case that's not positioned right next to your head how bad can it be? I've had loud fans before but that is usually easy to deal with by case location and positioning. I do hear what you say about the average person expecting a quiet card right out of the box. But are we average computer users? And is this card made for the average user?
On the idea of noise vs performance. I definitely would choose performance and deal with the noise.
My own experience with Nvidia and ATI/AMD cards is that I have had several Nvidia cards fail physically, probably do to heat issues - most of these were EVGA cards for what that's worth. I have never had an ATI/AMD card failure - period. To me this indicates that ATI/AMD has always had a better handle on keeping their cards cool enough - even if the fan has to be loud. And Nvidia may go for performance but pay the price of physical failures. Just a theory but it would be interesting to count historically how many Nvidia vs ATI/AMD card failures there have been and for what reasons.
Not all games blast loud volumes at all times. When there's a break in the audio, you'll hear the card ruining the ambiance.
I definitely side on acoustics over performance. I can clearly hear my GPU fan ramp up from 20% to 25% on a fairly quiet AMD 7770. With no HDDs, a single 230mm case fan running at 300rpm, and a tower CPU cooler where the fan generally doesn't spin, it doesn't take much to be the dominant source of noise in the room.
I prefer quieter computing, and I would avoid these cards if I was stuck with air cooling. However, I found it kind of odd that there's no mention of water cooling in the article. There is a lack of third-party air coolers right now, but EKWB already has a 290/290X water block out (whether you can find one is another story). Unfortunately, liquid cooling isn't necessarily for everyone, and if you don't already have a setup, it may seem cost prohibitive.
I think most people care about acoustics. Imo most of those complaining where the loud minority of die hard fan boys most of which will never own a card that expensive. I bet almost everyone who gets one of these will either get it with an aftermarket cooler or put one on. If you spend that much money you want a better experience - that can't happen if your prettier graphics are cancelled out by an annoying whine.
The reference cooler is certainly disappointing, but I can understand AMD's position here. Sure, they could spend a few million dollars developing an awesome high-end blower like Nvidia did, but AMD is a smaller company than Nvidia and has more lines of business. That money could otherwise be spent on much more mission-critical areas, such as R&D on Excavator or GCN 3.0.
In my opinion, AMD's real mistake was promoting and selling retail reference cards for the 290/290X in the first place. The reference design should have been strictly for internal development purposes, with perhaps a few cards being sold to those end users who wanted to use waterblocks. The first wave of retail releases should have been made by AIBs, using their own superior cooling designs such as the Asus DirectCU and MSI Twin Frozr. These should have been provided to reviewers.
Aftermarket cards have been superior to reference for a long time, but this is one of the first instances where the reference design is just flat-out inadequate.
AMD should've allowed AIBs to release aftermarket versions at the same time (and actually send them to reviewers), while also providing reference versions to those who must have exhaust coolers.
I'm doubtful the majority saying that over 50db is acceptable have never owned a 290. That really is an insane noise level. Remember the increase is exponential.
What bothers me about the explicit refusal to recommend the 290 card and your explanation above is the elevation of one specific factor above all else and using that as the basis to withhold a recommendation when the product is not designed around that factor. It would be one thing to withhold a recommendation for a case that is sold as muffling noise if it doesn't. That goes to the heart of the purpose of the product so if it's not silent, it's failed. But the 290 isn't designed as a silent card so your elevation of its acoustics above all else struck me as highly inappropriate. You pushed your personal preference above all end and I think that's inappropriate.
Don't get me wrong; I think it would have completely fair of you to go in-depth about how disappointed you were in the acoustic quality of the card and written pages and pages of it. But you crossed the line from reviewer to advocate with an personal agenda and opened a slippery slope. What next? Is Anandtech going to explicitly refuse to endorse high priced video cards like the Titan or the 780 Ti because you think reasonable prices are paramount and you can't recommend cards that cost $750 or $1000? I personally would never pay that much for a video card but I didn't think Anandtech should have concluded its reviews of those cards by saying "don't buy it, we can't recommend them because they're too expensive." I support what you did with those cards when it came to their pricing - point out how expensive they are, discuss their price/performance profile and then leave it to the READER to decide whether they want to pay the price for the performance. Why you didn't do the same with the 290 review - say the card is loud, even say it's too loud for you - is a mystery and frankly, your explanation above still doesn't justify the review's conclusion.
If you've been reading, they don't really ever recommend the top-end video cards because of price.
It sounds like you just want an article full of bar graphs, not a review of a product. Reviewer opinions are an extremely important part of the process - giving context to the numbers based on real-life experience with the hardware.
If you were as careful a reader as you purport to be, you might have noticed Ryan didn't just refuse to recommend the 290, he actually wrote reader should not buy it:
"To get right to the point then, this is one of a handful of cards we’ve ever had to recommend against. The performance for the price is stunning, but we cannot in good faith recommend a card this loud when any other card is going to be significantly quieter."
Show me a high-priced graphics review where Ryan urged the reader NOT to buy it. He doesn't. This is his conclusion to the Titan review:
"The end result is that Titan is targeted at a different demographic than GTX 580 or other such cards, a demographic that has the means and the desire to purchase such a product. Being used to seeing the best video cards go for less we won’t call this a great development for the competitive landscape, but ultimately this is far from the first luxury level computer part, so there’s not much else to say other than that this is a product for a limited audience. But what that limited audience is getting is nothing short of an amazing card."
Big difference between that and telling readers not to buy a card. He should have stuck with the approach he's taken in the past. I also question the motive to send a message to AMD: Ryan wrote in his review that "Next to price/performance the most important metric is noise, and by focusing on build quality NVIDIA has unquestionably set the new standard for high-end, high-TDP video cards." Well, if the reason to recommend against the 290 was to send a message to AMD about noise, then why hasn't he recommended against $1000 graphics cards in the past? By his own statement, price/performance is more important than noise yet he hasn't recommended against a card that, by his own description, " we have to contend with the fact that unlike any big-GPU card before it, Titan is purposely removed from the price/performance curve." Yet the Titan review did not conclude with a big "do not buy" statement.
And as I said in my first post and will say again, I don't want a data dump. I want him to express his opinion but to do it consistency from review to review. His decision to recommend against a card did not follow the approach he has taken in the past with other cards that, by his own reviews, did not meet the factors he considers important.
This is why I have NVidia, and specifically always bought EVGA SC, FTW, Classified versions of the cards while using EVGA's Precision X controller software, In turn I can decide at any given specific time how I want the card to react, whether wearing a headset, or listening through speakers. Choice in my book is king, as a matter a fact you can feel like one when given choices.
I totally agree on the acoustics being important... but I think you MUST mention the fact that AMD's reference cooler is awful, and the fact that Nvidia's reference cooler is actually decent at stock settings. I feel like people who read AT knows about this and we are definitely not the reflective of the general populace. So if you explicitly recommend against the 290 REFERENCE board I would've been totally fine. BTW I also believe there is a fair number who buys reference top-tier boards will replace the reference coolers with water blocks or aftermarket heat-sinks anyway. I think the better message to send to AMD would be to match Nvidia's reference cooler performance.
That's the message I got from his review (s)... Maybe he has to be more implicit for some readers? I just don't see why AMD wouldn't encourage custom cooling solutions from their partners more quickly. Lack of choice is the real issue here, it's seriously stiffening the potential of their silicon. If they didn't wanna commit more resources to the blower design, then don't compound theproblem by pushing the bad design unto every partner.
Hmm maybe I should be more clear: The message I got was: "too loud, sacrifice the perf (via conservative fan profile thus earlier throttles)" rather than "too loud, design a better reference cooler". Then again it could be just me?
I agree, they should allow partners to launch reference boards and custom boards at the same time, that would have solved all the issues really... but what do I know about business mechanics and profit margins =/
I owned a ref GTX 480 and i thought i was pretty loud. now back when i owned it, i made a custom fan profile and my temps never went past 75C while in game. granted for that card, thats really good and the noise was not that bad. i have no idea what the dB my card was running at. but i know it did not sound like what the 290 and 290X did. i went from the GTX 480 (in sli) to a single 680 and then i noticed how much louder it was. at night time though i would notice it allot when i turned my speakers down.
IMO, i want a card that does not get hot and is not loud. so first comes heat, then noise, then power. if its a tad loud BUT keeps my temps at 75C or lower, im happy. but being that these 2 cards are so damn loud BUT cant keep the temps below 90C thats not right IMO. i dont care how many times they say the card is ok running at 90C. would you be ok if your car guy says yeah its ok that your car idle's at 4000RPM. while most cars down. it will wear down faster no matter what they say. plus i really dont like the fact that they are pushing this card to its threshold right off the bat. the 780 Ti temp target is 83. it hits that yes. but does not throttle the crap out of its clocks AND the kicker, if you raise the temp target to its max (95) the card still boosts way past its stated boost clock and still is able to stay below 85C without any help.
if they knew that these 2 cards 290 and the X, were going to be heavly dependent on temps and fan profiles, why did they ship these cards with crap HSF? why didnt AMD make their own Third part type cooler like ASUS, or MSI are making? i know amd is trying to steal the Price per performance market but hell. 20 bucks markup to keep the cards cooler than 85C is worth it imo.
This is how to write an article. Yes Tom's Hardware found the problem, but the articles there where like written by Nvidia stuff.
Anyway sound is going to be a more important matter in the future and custom coolers are going to be something more than just good looks. But for many people noise is not a problem. Today many are using tablets or laptops or, like me, a second ultra quiet PC for everyday use. Then they have another PC just for gaming or really heavy tasks like video encoding, photo processing. That PC can be much faster, with much more noise, needing much more power from the wall socket. I am pretty sure that someone who can afford a card like 290 or 780 does have enough money for a second quiet PC or a tablet or a laptop.
1) Ryan should be allowed to have his own opinion on the card and express that in his review 2) Ryan's opinion should not dictate the conclusion of the review 3) This is not a failure of Ryan for having an opinion, this is a failure of the editorial process to not pick up on how opinionated the review came due to Ryan's focus on noise above other factors.
The review should have been fine first time round with better editorial control to temper/balance out Ryan's conclusion, but it seems that this was lacking in the review. It also seems to be lacking in the 780Ti review, which talks about the HD290X vs 780Ti while failing to mention the key difference between the cards, being $100.
In the 290 review, there is clear discussion of price differences and performance difference, and whether value for money is offered. In the 780Ti review, there is no discussion of whether it is worth its premkium over the 290 cards of the 780.
These are the sorts of things that the editor should be catching to improve the quality of articles, so that this sort of post-review acknowledgement of the original review does not need to be made.
The 780Ti was explained many times in the review to be a card that is outside of the price/performance chart. It is the flagship product and not meant to have be a value proposition at all. The conclusion clearly states:
"At $700 it’s by no means cheap – and this has and always will be the drawback to NVIDIA’s flagships so long as NVIDIA can hold the lead – but it also means that NVIDIA does need to take AMD’s Radeon R9 290 series into account. As such the 290X and the GTX 780, though lesser performing parts, will remain as spoilers for GTX 780 Ti due to their better balance of performance and pricing. All the while GTX 780 Ti stands at the top of the heap for those who want the best."
So you're saying that Ryan should have to write the entire review, and then change the conclusions to match some nebulous general opinion instead of what he really thinks?
I already know that nobody on this site reads bylines (see: almost every comment on the R290 review being addressed to Anand instead of Ryan), but they're there for a reason.
Noise is very important to me. I leave my pc on 24/7 and it's right next to my bed so you best believe I pick all my components based on noise first and foremost. For any like minded readers like me this is my recommendation. If you only game at 1920x1080 and want a solid 60 fps with ultra details for current and near future games the GTX 760 is the best choice. If you want something that will be more future proof for this scenario pony up the extra 80 dollars and get the GTX 770. If you game at 2560x1600/1440 and want a solid 60 fps with ultra details probably 95-97% of games will run like this with a GTX 780 and I would solidly recommend that over the GTX 780ti which is a whole 200 dollars over. If you want to game on a 3840x2140 (4k) resolution there is currently no card that can sustain that res on ultra details at 60fps. I recommend 2x GTX 780 in SLI for this resolution. 2x GTX 780ti is overkill and the regular 780 in SLI will be enough.
Unfortunately when I got my dell u3014 and my radeon 5870 was no longer cutting it my options were GTX 680 or GTX titan or radeon 7970 so the only card that gave the performance I needed was 1049 dollars. I probably could of skated by with the gtx 680 but the titan had just come out and i do like to contribute to folding @ home and things like that and loan my processing power out. Got a good 9 months of having the top performing single card which is pretty good in the pc world. There are some situation where the titan does drop below 60 fps but I wont be upgrading till maxwell comes out. Hopefully a nice 2560x1600 30 inch with gsync becomes available around the time maxwell does. That will be a potent combination.
Just get a Gigabyte Windforce edition. The 3x will do, they run silent and cool and they tend to be very cost effective. My last 4 cards, a mix of AMD and NVIDIA have all been those and you never have to worry about noise or temps again...
Ryan, I loved your initial conclusion and acoustics is definitely high on my priority list.
I am guessing there are more people like me who do not generally write comments and mostly just read the reviews on various tech sites [like AT]. And to be honest, I come here to read your honest view/opinion and not something that is written to appease everyone [like the kind of balancing act being done in this article]. So, please do include your personal views in future reviews.
I have often felt that reviewers don't put enough value on non-performance based specs. Sound is the most relevant one for video cards, but for other types of products it can be battery life or temperature that is the relevant secondary characteristic.
However, reading the conclusion on for the R290, it felt unfair to pan the whole product because it failed one area. If performance is good and price/performance is good that's an automatic rubber stamp of approval. The best way to handle it would have been to give a big caveat where there's a gaping hole in the product's overall value.
The way I rate video cards is like this (descending importance): 1) Price [I'm not going above $200] 2) Brand rotation [I have to alternate Nvidia and AMD so I have reasonably new versions of each brand for testing purposes] 3) Price/Performance 4a) DX/OGL support level 4b) Acoustics 4c) Secondary features [CUDA, Eyefinity, etc.] 5) Bundles
Great post! Like I said in a comment under the 290 article: I don't care about reference design loudness. If I buy a reference design card, it is because I will swap the cooler for an aftermarket solution like the Arctic Accelero stuff or (in my case) a water cooling block. If I buy a card for use as is, I wait for custom stuff like the Lightning series from MSI or the new Gigabyte OC'ed things. They are a bit pricier usually, but offer enough extras to justify it and in my experience, achieve better overclocks. And when I game I have my headset on (not noise cancelling) and don't hear anything of the PC anyway.
Since you asked for opinions... Acoustics are important to me, but in the case of the 290 specifically they wouldn't matter. From my point of view (assuming I was presently in the market) I would be buying a waterblock for the GPU regardless. So having the 290 offer such good value with a cheap cooler is great, because I'd be replacing it anyway. Watercooling would easily tame such a card and let it offer max performance all the time.
As a GTX 480 FTW Hydrocopper owner I am very aware of what a good WC setup can do to incredibly hot/loud cards. Max performance, longevity, slightly lower power consumption, and most of all silent acoustics.... Been running it 24/7 folding with an overclock since day one and it's still running strong.
That's a niche scenario and wouldn't change the conclusion. The people who are doing that already know to skip over the "acoustics/thermals" page anyway.
I care a lot about noise. Anything more than a whisper is irritating.
I go to a fair amount of effort to make my PCs as quiet as is feasible - careful selection of components, swapping out fans for larger, slower ones, sound-proofing in the case... but quiet graphics cards have been very hard to come by, and usually even the quietest one (with sufficient performance to justify an upgrade) will overshadow all the other noise from the machine, even at idle.
I can see there's definitely a market for cards like the 290, but I really appreciate you making a fuss about acoustics, especially with the makers listening, because it really matters to me, and others, and it's not really something I feel they're addressing adequately.
Voltage is out of control, which explains a lot. I really wish they'd have worked in a system to get that more managed, so their power levels didn't skyrocket out of control as the card grows faster. They're at high levels for bottom end and it's making the high end really hot and loud.
Moreover, as many others have said, I wish they'd put a quality blower on there.
Third parties might show up and save the day, but in the end most of them will be open air coolers that blow all that hot air into your case, which will increase the stress on your entire system's cooling. That will probably lead to louder volume from your entire system to help compensate for the reduced volume from the card(s!).
It is an irony to push TrueAudio while at the same time pushing a card that requires you to raise the volume to absurd levels to overcome the volume of the card(s!).
And what you said, Ryan, about this becoming the new norm is the most frightening part of the whole thing. Look at what nVidia did with the 780 Ti. They raised the fan speeds, raised the upper temperature, and increased the overall noise.
This is the slippery slope and AMD started out on it (again no less!) at a markedly high place. It's only going to get louder from here if they continue down this road. There really needs to be an accepted limit and they were pushing it before.
Now they're just making it louder. I mean, imagine that. The damn cards are actually louder than they were before and what they were before was unacceptable. How many more driver updates are going to "improve" the card with louder acoustics?
I really, really don't want this to be the norm going forward. Louder, hotter cards to try and keep up with competition that has a superior design. When nVidia overclocked the GK104 part to keep up with the Tahiti parts, they didn't push the acoustics or performance per watt argument in the wrong direction. They actually improved the argument.
But when AMD pushes Hawaii to get it up to Big Kepler levels, they seemed to have no options EXCEPT to worsen acoustics and performance per watt. That's just piss-poor planning.
Users could overclock/under clock or use a different coolong solution to move along the curve for each, but the curve itself will be fixed by the silicon
I would also like to see how far you can push the recent generation of cards with some undervolting whilst keeping the stock clocks.
And with this heat issue on the rise, I do worry that GPUs, when they move to smaller processes and higher transistor density, could end up like Haswell. Could this possibly happen?
Also could this heat issue just be due to transistor density. The 290x has 6.1 billion transistors compared the GTX780 with 7.1 billion transistors, while the 290x has a smaller die size (551mm^2 vs 424mm^2, respectively)?
This is already happening. Haswell and Hawaii are not anomalies, and this problem will only get worse in the future (without a massive breakthrough in controlling leakage). In the past, the leakage per transistor was halved when the transistor size was halved, which resulted in twice as many transistors in the same power envelope. Now, the leakage per transistor is remaining constant while the transistor size is shrinking, resulting in more heat in a smaller area. The only way to compensate is to reduce clock speeds, which diminishes the gains of going to a larger die.
THIS IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHY ANANDTECH.COM IS THE BEST.
To me, the best aspect of AnandTech is the BLEND of objective analysis and opinion... and the clear distinction between the two.
Most of the reviews here are quite transparent in terms of what they test and how they do it. That makes it harder to fake favorable reviews (or at least the test results).
Then the writers go "beyond the numbers" and give you their impressions and opinions. I don't mind if they say, "According to the test results, Acme comes out on top, but I still prefer the other brand because of X, Y, and Z." For example, they'll explain that although two cards have the same volume level (db), one is more annoying because of the pitch, or is more irritating in how it changed suddenly rather than gradually. Things like that are more subjective and not revealed in the graphs and numeric values, but are good to know about, Sometimes it's simply that they've had good experiences working with a company, and that creates a personal bias. At least they're up front about it.
In the R9 290 review, not only did Ryan state his "too loud" opinion, he referenced it against other cards, indicating where he felt the breaking point was.
Everyone is free to have their opinion, and can disregard his "advice" if they want. But at least they can't complain later and say they weren't warned. And if you truly do value performance at any acoustic cost, then that of course is your choice.
So... THANKS AGAIN FOR ANOTHER GREAT REVIEW, RYAN. Keep up the good work, and continue to give us both the facts and your interpretation of them.
First off, I have been a big fan of Anandtech since 2008, and that b/c Anandtech was always many steps ahead of the competition in publishing accurate, unbiased and unambiguous reviews as well as giving away many OC or performance secrets.
As to the matter at hand: We the ppl who read this site every day are, for the most part, enthusiasts and avid overclockers. Do you really think that someone who goes so far in the pursuance of performance as to bother with Northbridge Latencies, Memory Overclocks and PLL voltages, would give a damn about how loud a GPU is?
In my rig, I have got installed Thermaltake Frio OCK (Overclock King) CPU cooler. At 2000 RPM, it produces 60 DB of sound. A card, therefore, that produces as much or slightly more sound is definitely not a problem or a concern, at least to me. I don't even use headphones while gaming. I just crank up the volume, and the HD sound of the game completely covers up the 60db of my CPU cooler sounds.
For me, there's only four things that really matter when buying a GPU: 1. Price, 2. Performance, 3. Operating temperature, 4. Overclocking headroom.
So yes, I will definitely buy either the R290 or R290X, but definitely I won't buy a reference card. As an enthusiast, I only buy cherry-picked chips such as the SOC special edition of Gigabyte's or the Classified edition of EVGA.
Sound pollution, unless it goes up to ridiculous levels (around 80db), is therefore not a concern.
However, i find your GTX 780Ti conclusion pushes too much wieght on 1440p gaming. Seeing benchamrk results and how AMD scales better at higher res, you should at least say something along the lines of: "If you are gaming at 4k resolution, or using an eyefinity/surround setup, then AMD 290/290X offer better price/performance (at the cost of noise)".
That's a reasonable complaint. But as we stated in the article, we don't believe it makes any sense right now to do 4K gaming off a single card. The quality compromise required to achieve reasonable framerates is very severe for a single card, so to achieve both that high resolution and with high image quality settings, you need to go the SLI/CF route.
All the more so when a 60Hz 4K monitor is north of $3000; a pair of 290Xs or 780 Tis is less than half the cost of the display itself. And that is why we are focusing on 1440p, as it's the highest 16:9 resolution a single card is going to be used with right now.
Speaking as someone with a 4K monitor, I wouldn't touch the 290X even though it has higher theoretical performance for one simple reason: It's completely impractical to CF them without water cooling due to the insane amounts of noise. And while water cooling is all well and good, SLI 780tis are still at a completely reasonable noise level and the price differential doesn't really mean anything in this segment of the market. So, unless you are specifically interested in a water cooling setup, the 290X is more or less one card only in my opinion.
Ryan, I really feel you did the right thing pointing out how AMD became too greedy of performance at the expense of too high noise levels. I prioritize low noise levels in my gaming system as I have grown older. I've had HD4870 - even in crossfire, and they become very hot and the fan keeps spinning up and down from time to time out of nowhere. That should be history!
I want a sound balance (hehe) between performance and noise, and AMD should get that message!
So AMD made the card even louder. This proves that iniital fan speed hike was a "knee-jerk reaction to Nvidia's Price Cuts. Also, i wouldnt worry about AMD or Nvidia saying "it's ok to run loud and hot" because after all, these products have to be watered down for mobile, and thermals and sound is very important there. This card is still a no-buy for me, and i hear custom cards are a long way off.
I game at night so acoustics are extremely important to keeping the household harmony intact. I was dead keen on upgrading to at 290X or 290 but after reading the reviews have decided they are too loud. I will wait to see the custom solutions and may even stump up the extra for a 780 Ti if the power/acoustics are better. I currently own the MIS 5870 lightning which is a custom cooler design. If MSI ship a GTX 780 Ti Lightning it will be very tempting or a 290X lightning, my choice will come down to performance vs acoustics with the latter being a show stopper if they are too loud.
So, I don't understand where is the problem: if the fan is too loud, then decrease its speed! Then Lower performance - ok, give me a better performance card for 399$ !
The original review conclusion made a lot of sense to me. It would be silly to buy a reference board with an awful cooling system when its entirely likely you'll soon be able to buy that same performance with a better cooling system for not much more money.
I'm also starting to wonder if maybe the logarithmic scale of db is doing readers a disservice. Anand's and other reviewer's bar charts make it seem like 57db is pretty much about the same as 60db, or very slightly different. In reality that's not true, its more like a 2x difference. Those bar charts would look & feel very different if the noise was reported in a linear vs logarithmic scale.
i owned pair of EVGA 560 GTX which didnt have ACX coolers back then, when i bought the first one, i didnt consider the noise as a big deal, it was too loud and bothered me but i carried on and bought the second one after prices went down, i made THIS trade off to get another 560 GTX than upgrading to a quieter solution, i was tempted by the price and performance i would get. Anyway, things got really ugly while fans are on 60%, i had to get rid of them and upgrade to better cooling solution.
eventually I got Gigabyte 770 GTX Winforce 3x as i heard its the quietest cooling solution available and indeed it is.
Eventually, i learned my lesson and would never ever make that trade off and get a noisy card. first thing i look at when i shop for a card is the cooling solution.
I found it unfortunate that CPU and GPU manufacturers always seemed interested only in pushing speeds up, but never noise down. If you have +20% for a new generation, why not turn it into +10% performance and -5% noise? The situation may have changed some with CPUs, partly due to more mobile/power-efficiency focus, but desktop GPUs seem exempt.
At minimum I'd want to see, in both CPUs and GPUs, good dynamic software-configurable noise/performance control, with gradual transitions, etc.
And where's that purported membrane-based air moving fan-replacement technology already?
Your review made sense to most of us and your opinion was coming from personal preference on noise issues.. I think most of us understood that from your review. Also saw the high marks you gave the card in other areas. It was an excellent review in my opinion and balanced.
I think that in order for the gamer to be satified, the need to use the loud active speaker or good headphones that the fan noise is not a problem.
Fan noise is very disturbing for a HTPC, but the HTPC will not use the R9 290. And while working and browsing the fan noise will not be that loud, so the conclusion is weird like nvidia fanboy written..
Has anyone ever considered that AMD might have _purposefully_ used a bad cooler because they want their partners to sell more boards (and have more partners to carry their boards) and that, compared to previous generations of cards, they might be earning more money per partner card sold?
not really... initial launches almost always come with the reference design with no aftermarket solutions. Those cards have a tendency to stick around thru-out the life of the product...as lemons really.. so it would be smart of Nvidia and Amd to have a higher end cooler design.. and simply scale back as their partners implement their own stamps on a card.
Noise is very important to me...I choose my Asus 7950 Direct CU primarily for the quiet cooling solution. However, what I don't necessarily agree with is the focus of your review(s) upon noise when we're talking about a new reference card...I mean, who buys these things anyway, except people who want to take it apart and add a WC solution?
In my mind, reference solutions are never ideal, or even good, and I felt that your harping on this was overdone considering most people will not be buying reference cards...
The only thing I got out of this "article" besides the fact that AMD is scrambling after the 780 Ti numbers came out (all the numbers (FPS/Thermals/Acoustics/etc)) is that AnAndTech is now trying to please the trolls with their previously data back conclusions. Now of course some amount of opinion is always part of a conclusion, but I have been on this site for over a decade and this is the first time I literally slapped myself in the forehead when reading an article. You can't please everyone and you shouldn't be taking a tally of negative feedback vs. positive to figure out if you "did it right". You (AnAndTech) should continue to write your articles as you always have (backed with data and knowledgeable insight) and let the comments be their own entity, not involved with the review at all (even with a revised article like this). I believe some of this link applies to what you all just did with this "article" : http://gradschool.about.com/od/publishing/a/reject...
BTW, I own a 480 (as a backup) and that thing is ridiculous power hungry and hot (though it can be "tamed" with aftermarket solutions). However even bringing up the notorious 1st revision of Fermi should make AMD ashamed to release such a card in the 4th Quarter of 2013 with how far we have come in the engineering of heat transfer.
For me, (since you asked for personal opinion) the noise is a complete deal breaker. Drowning out the noise is not an acceptable solution to me.
Interestingly, my loudest card is the one I currently use (a MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti-448). When put it in an Antec SOLO II the open cooling style of the card just put too much heat into the case and the fans quickly spun up to maximum to deal with it. After I moved it into a Fractal Design R3 and installed a side fan pulling air out, the card became one of the quietest I've ever owned. What's funny is that the 560Ti was replacing a blower-style PNY GeForce GTX 9800 and the Antec case was able to muffle the blower-style card extremely well.
I guess the moral of the story is that the sound profile of a particular graphics card can change drastically depending on your case/configuration. Open style cards need *open* cases with lots of airflow and blower style cards are better put in *closed* cases.
Anand - I love you guys - but you really missed the boat on this article.
Go back and read Tom's. The issue was never with the cherry picked samples AMD provided you. It was with the real chips on real cards that we can buy.
The driver updates really prove my point. They have almost 0 impact on the cherry picked AMD reference cards. The retail cards have lower binned chips that run hotter, and lower speed fans. The new AMD drivers are not a solution. The make these fans run at 55% of peak capacity instead of 40% - and the cards are still 5%-10% slower then retail.
Rather than worry about people saying price and performance are all that matter and noise doesn't, why don't you focus on the con game AMD is playing to get your reviews to show their card beating Titan.
Or how about we ignore all of these reviews and you do a 780ti vs 290x faceoff once retail boards with aftermarket cooling solutions are available?
I once purchased a single-fan HD6870 only to realize it totally undermine all the effort I had put into making my case quiet. I returned it and ordered a different one. So, acoustic is pretty high up on my requirement list.
For what it's worth, noise is a deal breaker to me. So much so that I finally went to one of Asus' DirectCU format cards. I won't ever go back to a stock cooler format.
What perplexes me is why so many companies make an enclosed water cooling solution for CPUs but not GPUs. I'd think on of the GPU distributors would have tried it by now. We already have them putting out cards with water cooling blocks installed.
1) I wouldn't trade my perfectly silent Asus GTX 660 TOP for anything. Best GPU purchase I've made. I'm not sure a "silent" GPU is a necessity, but that should be the target. [Disclamier:] I don't game with headphones so I need my PC to be quiet.
2) The fact that the 290/X reference coolers need to be this loud to achieve 85C temps is a testament to how underdesigned they are. There's still a maximum operating frequency on the Core/Memory, but the reference cooler isn't strong enough to dissipate the load.
3) I don't like AMDs new "target temperature" approach. Even if the components are made to run at those temps for a lifetime, they'd still statistically last longer if they were cooler. Hotter temps = hotter exhaust air. For these reference blower designs, that might not be a problem, but for the axial fan custom coolers that will eventually come out, that's a real problem because all that heat goes into your case. Obviously, I'd expect the custom coolers to be in the 70-75C range, but that loops back to #2 above.
Noise has zero bearing on my computer purchasing decisions. My case is in my basement and my actual office area is on the floor above, with cables running from the PC case up into my office. Any PC I deploy competes with the server and network racks it is sitting next to in terms of noise. Given the screaming fans on 1U, 2U and 4U enclosures, something like the R9 290 wouldn't even appreciably add to the existing din. :-) However, if it was to go into my office, I'm sure a decent sound-proofed case would go a long way towards making it acceptable. If it still was too loud, then a third party cooler would do the trick, I'm sure. Actually, given the potential shown by TH of adding a third party cooler to an 290, I think I'll end up going that route, just for performance sake.
I had an NVIDIA 275 that I found to be too loud at load, am so much more content with the acoustics of my current 660ti that it replaced. It's not silent but at least tolerant. Acoustics matter to me, and appreciated the insight of your original review. Would like to see AMD return to it's glory days when efficiency mattered and they were competitive with NVIDA in that department. It's almost like they have swapped places in this department.
I would love to see a comparison of the 290 , 290x 780, 780 Ti with water coolers working efficiently. I believe that anyone spending $600 on a Gfx card would be able to spend an additional 100-200$ for a cool setup.
Further i would love to see if there is any performance increase due to increased cooling( With respect to boost states both Nv and AMD.
I thought that this matter, and the direction we should be moving to (less noise), was already set. I don't mean to sound rude, but it's frankly absurd and utterly disappointing that some people apparently don't care about noise at all and are willing to buy a card with such a poor cooler. Reference designs are coming soon after all.
It's not crucial that AMD up their game, why would they if there are enough partners to do great designs for them; it's just that such poor reference designs shouldn't make it to market. More alarmingly, with the on-going trend of open-cooler designs I fear that the art of the blower would be lost, and the end user will only suffer from this.
Personally, I have an exceptionally hard time of letting go of my reference semi-blower/open 560 Ti, that cooler is so silent that even open-air coolers (that I've tried) can't beat it. The very thought of using a louder card is so depressing I can't bear it, and while that is a hyperbole it's closer to reality than you might think...
As a reviewer you shouldn't concern yourself with sending messages at all. To do so is inappropriate and arrogant. It's the same as saying 'Hey, that stuff I wrote is not actually true - I skewed the review because I want the next product to my personal liking'.
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Galcian - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I had a GTX 280 and that card could get REALLY hot even when adjusting the fan profile, it burned out eventually. Not the most silent card. I also pushed my HD 4890 with it's stock cooler to 1025 mHz core and adjusted the fan speed, so it got loud with the stock cooler. But then again I have a 5.1 setup and a dedicated sound card so I like to crank the volume up... hard. The R9 290 "noise issue" is a non-issue for me personally. To be honest I'm waiting for the ones with aftermarket cooling solutions to reduce the FPS variance. The nVidia cards even with their good heatsink/fan combo are too expensive for the relative performance offered.The Von Matrices - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
If you crank up the speaker volume to drown out the noise then your dedicated sound card is pointless. It doesn't matter if your SNR is 120dB or 80dB when your noise floor is 50dB.Filiprino - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
But the card is inside a case, a closed case and at a distance from you, so the noise is not so high.heffeque - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Anda, Filiprino. No esperaba encontrarte por aquí :-Pspeconomist - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I actually expected to see you around here.HisDivineOrder - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Sometimes you use your GPU for something that doesn't involve the volume being 100% of the time at 100%, blaring. Also, turning up the volume to make for your GPU(s!) squealing is a great way to need even louder volume settings by 35 and hearing aids at 45.And by chance, what do you do during the quiet periods every game has? Just not hear the ambiance? What's the point of a great audio subsystem (TrueAudio) then? Or do you just "MAN THE VOLUME KNOB!" turning it up and down like a madman?
Wouldn't it just be easier if AMD gave a damn about their cooling and voltage controls?
1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Yeah you should have had an EVGA 9800 GX2 SC, fastest card at that time, but damn thing could cook an egg on your case.dwade123 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
290 is really a degraded 290x. It uses much more power than a 290x and it's supposed to be weaker in specs. Lol.Gigaplex - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Of course it is. They simply die harvest the under performing 290X instead of throwing the parts in the bin. This is standard industry practice.Kevin G - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
To further expand this point, it looks like the harvesting is done with two variables: voltage and functional units. AMD doesn't want to go beyond the 300W limit of the PCI-E spec and form the looks of things, running an 290X at the 290 voltages + fan speed would push it over.Morawka - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
So even tho the 290 is a cut down 290X, it uses more power and produces more heat using the same die. WTF ?!?!You dont see the 780 running hotter and louder than titan. or a 670 using more power and heat than a 680 etc...
It should use less power and produce less heat than a fully enabled chip, else it's just a bad, inefficient. architecture.
Minion4Hire - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
You would see it if Titan and the 780 ran at different voltages. But they don't.The R9 290 runs 100-200 mV higher than the 290X. Even without a clock speed difference this would mean higher temps and higher wattage on the cheaper card. It's likely that they never intended for this to happen but issues with yields forced their hand with lower binned parts needing higher voltages.
Braumin - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
It's amazing how much engineering goes into designing these chips, and then they can't engineer a decent cooling solution.Or, more likely, they figured they would save some money on the cooler because people just look at framerates in the benchmarks. I'm with you Ryan. I can't stand loud computers and there's really no need in this day and age. Luckily I'm sure some aftermarket coolers or 3rd part cards will ditch the reference cooler and put something better on.
In fact one of the things I hated most about my last AMD card - the 4850 - was that the fan speed under load was quite loud, but even worse it was constantly adjusting the speed. Up down up down up down up up up down down. It was extremely annoying for sure. My 560 Ti doesn't do any of that.
The Von Matrices - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I agree and I also want to thank Ryan for his conclusion. Sure, there are people who can stand the loud card, but this is a $400-$550 piece of equipment. You shouldn't have to settle for that price. Some one needed to stand up for this, and I'm glad Ryan did. Anything less than a non-recommendation would not initiate change, as apparently all his previous reviews that criticized loudness but still recommended the card did nothing. Even him lauding the reference NVidia 250W heatsink for the past year did not get the point across.I strongly agree that Ryan has the right idea behind his reviews. 99+% of people who buy a graphics card want it to work out of the box without modifications, and recommending a card based upon requiring it to be modified is insane. Ryan, also thank you for using "quiet" as the default setting and the basis for judging the card's performance. I completely agree that the majority of people who buy these cards will not think twice about what the BIOS switch does and will leave their cards in the default "quiet" setting.
There are plenty of people in these R9 290/X review threads who argue that "well, you can just get an aftermarket heatsink/water cooling" and "just wait for the custom coolers." The problem is that you rate a product on what it is, not what it can be. There will be reviews on the custom cooled cards eventually, but for now Ryan's conclusion is completely valid. Adding aftermarket custom cooling is not "easy" for the majority of people. In an enthusiast forum it may seem normal but it is far too advanced for 90+% of people who buy this card. Plus that aftermarket cooling costs at least $50, and when you consider that a properly cooled R9 290 is $450 (or $475 with an Accelero Xtreme III as recommended in other forums), the R9 290's value proposition is eliminated.
inherendo - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
While a lot of people don't want to do aftermarket, I think you are completely off in your 90% estimation. This is a 400 dollar card, not a mid level or entry level card.But everything else I agree with.
1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
The problem with aftermarket cooling is the fact you have to do it yourself, and lets face it people aren't the brightest star in the sky, engineering your own custom watercooling loop is hard for professionals given the total equation of the parts(that is when it is built properly), and I imagine 98% of the people won't crack open a thermodynamics book to actually learn what they should be using instead of what they are willing to buy.superjim - Wednesday, November 20, 2013 - link
Watercooling is not rocket science. There are many basic calculators online to help you figure out how much radiator space you need for the wattage you're dumping into it. When in doubt, just get a larger radiator. A quality pump like the MCP655 can easily handle three triple 120mm radiators by itself. One pump, one or two radiators, some tubing, and you're done (reservoir is optional).Sancus - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
The more money I have to spend, the less likely I am to want to waste my time modifying a product that should work well out of the box.1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
"The problem is that you rate a product on what it is, not what it can be. "- I agree wholeheartedly, If that was the case a car's value would skyrocket the moment people develop parts for it to compete in higher brackets, and lets face it, more often than not peole will buy the Ferrari if they can afford it versus paying 30k for a supra or skyline and sinking 75-150k to make it perform like the former mentioned, and really not be the same at all due to the engineering limitations that one cannot change.MrSpadge - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I agree with pretty much anything you said here. And what I really would have liked from AMD, if they didn't want to afford a better cooler, is to just offer an alternative: e.g. the already mentioned excellent Accelero Xtreme III keeps the 290 at maximum clock speed constantly, even with its fans at 7 V.. at a noise level even less than regular cards at idle. Sure, it needs a 3rd slot. But from my point of view such a cooler is what these cards really need. Otherwise all the work AMD put into their silicon is almost wasted.We can get the Accelero Xtreme III for ~40€, so I could easily imagine AMD getting them for ~20€ in massive quantities. Would it be so hard to offer such a version from the start.. and while doing so avoid pretty much all the negative press?!
BTW: I had a 9800GTX with reference blower, a HD4870 with some alternative cooler and a HD6950 with unlocked shaders. None of thme lasted longer than a few hours with stock cooling in my PC, just totally unbearable. I used Accelero S1 for the first two and a Termalright Shaman for the latter. A difference like night and day!
Currently I'm running a KFA² GTX660Ti with a power target if 108 W - at that point the stock cooler is fine (even at at 130 W).
jerrylzy - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I have to say NVIDIA has a far more better reference cooling system. The R9 290 is indeed too loud, and the voltage is ridiculously high, which, in my opinion, should be responsible for the high power consumption and noise level. I personally own a 7970ge vapour-x card, the stock voltage of which is 1.256v. The card is loud(but not insanely loud). After modifying some bios, I found that I can lower the voltage since I didn't need very high frequencies. Then I changed the voltage from 1.256v to 1.143v. The whole world became quite without losing performance.chrnochime - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
That and to this day GPUs are still exposed chip and not protected by heat spreader like CPUs are. Reminds me the horrors of installing heatsinks on Duron/Thunderbirds when they still were exposed chip. I am not willing to risk chipping/destroying the GPU when I need to pull the OEM heatsink off and putting the aftermarket one on.Will Robinson - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
And my 4850 never did that so there's goes your theory on that one.Mr Perfect - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Noise is as import to me as it seems to be to Ryan. The last time I used a video card with a reference cooler on it was... My Voodoo 5. Every card since then has either promptly had a a quieter aftermarket cooler added to it, or came with one pre-fitted.It will be interesting to see what the customized 290s look like.
Zumb - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I don't think that the cooler is bad because of a money issue.The great thing with that stock cooler is that it push the hot air outside the box, at the back of the case. Aftermarket cooler are way better, but they don't do that, so, they are extremly dependant of the case cooling performance.
Most of people don't see that, because people testing cards are poeples who care and have a good case cooling already, so aftermarket cooler are always better. But if the reference cooler was more dependant of the case cooling, I am pretty sure AMD would get a lot of burned card back in warrenty, installed in poorly cooled case. Are standard low budget acase are worse and worse every year sicne everybody like those tiny shiny micro ATX case.
chrnochime - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I know what you are saying. I still have my reference XFX 4870 that I got for a good price new back in 2008 sitting in my old PC, and loathed playing games back then because then I'd need to turn the fan speed up to keep it from overheating. The main reason why I went with a 770 over another loud AMD card this time around. I'd rather spend 30-40 dollars extra for a card that isn't going to drive me nuts every time the computer is running.abhishek_takin - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Its time AMD should learn few things. Everyone wants a all round card. AMD is giving performance for a great price by putting cooling, noise and power on line. GTX 480 was one of the hottest and HD6990 card was one of the nosiest card ever produced. Nvidia learned that thing and made card less hot and noisy in next generations. But AMD is still putting their issues on board partners and not releasing good reference models. Price of Nvidia cards are high because they are well equipped and build properly. And if they will charge high for that then its obvious as its scoring in all departments.I own a AMD HD7970 card but dont like the things what is happening in R9 edition cards.
1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
No, NVidia does price gouge along with board partners, simply put the chips in most cases are exactly the same, with disabled units attached or lower frequency clocks on the RAM, essentially you pay for Binn sifted parts and all around NVidia and ATI using sub par alloys like nickel plated aluminum heatsinking instead of using copper all around, which in the case of any card over 500$ is flat out a disgrace. Instead of pushing the industry forward they stifle it over generations that offer marginal increases, less than 10%, in order to reap higher profit margins, 680 to 770 is a great example of this.The Von Matrices - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
You are wrong on two counts. First, it is by no means cheap to design a new chip; think tens of millions of dollars. To design a new architecture, you need even more than that. Second, you forget that silicon process advances have slowed significantly. There's only so much you can do when you can't move to a smaller node as has been responsible for the yearly performance improvements in the past.Sure, NVidia could design a new chip to fit between GK110 and GK104, but think of the economics. They would be selling the chip for $300-$400, a very small portion of the overall graphics market. It would have a 20-25% performance improvement at most over existing products, significantly discouraging upgrades. And it would be obsolete in less than a year when the new 20nm process came out, which would significantly limit the ability to recoup cost. Taking a smaller margin on GK110 (aka GTX 780), performing extreme binning on GK104 (aka GTX 770), or just completely omitting the $400 target is a much safer proposition than designing a new chip to fit that market.
The only reason AMD designed Hawaii is because 20nm was delayed and the company couldn't push Tahiti to any higher performance level. If 20nm was coming in January, we would never see the Hawaii GPU because AMD could never sell enough chips to make it profitable before it was obsolete.
Yojimbo - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Noun 1. price gouging - pricing above the market price when no alternative retailer is availableHow is NVidia price gouging? You're setting the market price in your mind, but you don't have the power to make your fantasy a reality, and therefore NVidia price gouges? People go into an enterprise to turn a profit, and throughout their history NVidia has usually been profitable. But their profits have not been excessive, nor have they been based primarily on market relationships (e.g., Microsoft using Windows to foist Office). They have been profitable because they have been well-managed, and have produced successful, competitive products. People who complain "Oh, XY graphics card is too expensive. The companies are price gouging" sound like children who want, want, want but don't understand, or care to understand, how things work, but simply try to use a bully pulpit to get their way. Some people want the best graphics card that is out there, and are willing to pay a premium for it. The demand is there. When NVidia, or any other company, is in the position to tap into that demand, they will do so, because it's a high-margin segment.
As far as your assertion that the chips are the same, and NVidia and AMD are (my paraphrase, you used "price gouge") "gaming" the market, one must understand the structure of the industry. First of all, realize there is demand for graphics processors at various wide-ranging price points. A GPU company ideally would like to tap into all parts of said market. Next, realize that a large part of chip designers' costs are tied up in the design and validation of an architecture, which creates an economy of scale. Designing separate architectures, one each for a $100 card, for a $150 card, for a $200 card, etc, is terribly inefficient and such cards would be prohibitively expensive and uncompetitive. At the same time, if, for instance, it designed one architecture and released one product at, say, $200, it would probably have a very good product at that price point assuming everyone was willing to pay $200. But any competitor which was able to provide value at $150 or less or $250 or more will capture most of the market, and our company again would be losing out on the economy of scale, because it spent all that money designing a chip for a very narrow market segment; The price of its $200 chip would have to be increased just to attempt to break even to try to pay for the R&D expenses, because its competitor could spread those costs over a wider volume output. So what could be a solution? A solution is to sort of "zip" or "tar" the segments together in the design process, and then decouple them again when delivering individual products, assigning design costs unequally across the segments. For instance, Intel might see two markets, one which uses hyperthreading, and one which does not. There is a certain cost associated with developing hyperthreading, and they are only going to design one architecture. So they design that architecture with hyperthreading, then enable it for the one segment and don't enable it for the other. I think that in this case one could think about the cost structure for the hyperthreading-enabled chip as having the design costs of the hyperthreading as part of its total cost, while the cost structure of the non-enabled chip could leave the hyperthreading design cost out.
Another way to hit a range of market segments is by chip binning. There is a distribution of the quality of chips produced by a particular manufacturing process. Chips that perform at X quality or above are placed in the highest bin, and account for Y% of the total production. They are scarce because to get Z chips with at least X quality, one must make at least Z/(Y%) total chips. Intuitively, these X-quality chips therefore cost more to make.
As far as what you say about "sub-par alloys," your statement that it is "flat out a disgrace" to have aluminum heatsinks is based on what knowledge of the cost and benefit of various materials for heatsinks? I think your accusation that NVidia and AMD are not truly competing, but trying to hold back innovation to reap higher profits is unfounded and ridiculous. The reason generation-over-generation performance increases have lessened is because the GPU industry is maturing, and innovation gets increasingly difficult. In addition, semiconductor processes are not currently scaling heat-wise or cost-wise like they did years ago.
TerdFerguson - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Jesus, your post is downright offensive, Yojimbo. You discount everything the previous poster said (most of which I agree with 100%, by the way) by arguing that he doesn't have the depth of knowledge that's required to make assertions, but then you back up your own claims in no way whatsoever.One doesn't have to be a genius to correlate transistor counts, die sizes, lead counts, and materials into approximate manufacturing costs. Once done, you can see that NVidia is basically pricing the one product all over the place. How can you possibly explain the price of the Titan, when the 780TI rolls off the block a few months later at a drastically reduced price? Anyone with a little common sense will probably call it price gouging - the same thing that explains why the double-precision functionality on all the consumer boards are intentionally disabled with drivers.
wiz329 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
At least Yojimbo provided a reasoned explanation for his argument (which actually provide a good reason for the phenomenon you are complaining about in your post.) You just claim that anyone with any common sense should agree with you, OBVIOUSLY.Sancus - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Nvidia prices based on market demand, not based on fantasy numbers that come from enthusiasts posting on forums. If I price a video card at $1000 and it's sold out all the time, that actually means _I didn't price it high enough)_. If people thought Nvidia's cards were too expensive, they wouldn't buy them, and yet Nvidia controls far more than a majority market share of the desktop video card market.Why would ANY company say 'oh... people would pay $1000 for our card, but that just seems unfair, I guess we will price it at $600 and then when we cant supply nearly enough of them and people are angry they cant buy one, we can make ourselves feel better about the fact that we set the price fairly."
I mean, what? Everyone seems to think that the best video card has some "reasonable" price and it should never exceed that. It's nonsense. Price is based on demand. The reason that AMD cards are cheaper than Nvidia cards is because they MUST be cheaper in order to compete. AMD is technologically behind Nvidia in most generations. When you show up to a market 8 months late, you have to compete on price.
No company competes on price if they can better compete on features or performance. Everyone would chase high margins if they could.
Morawka - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
copper is good a conducting heat, not so much at dissipating it.. That's why the heatpipes are almost always nickel plated copper, and the heatsink's are light, aluminium which dissipates better.Also Pure copper would make the card very heavy and it would bow/flex lesser motherboards.
Kevin G - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I think that the reality is that we're approaching a limit to what can be done to cooling a power hungry PCI-E card within the official spec constraints. GPU's are chronically power limited: most of these designs have some clock speed and voltage headroom to go a bin or two higher but they'd be well outside of the PCI-E spec. Something has to give and well, the PCI-e spec doesn't list a maximum decibel level for noise a card can make. With 20 nm and future processes really only improving transistor density and not the power profile, things are not going to beAt this point I'd like to see some experimentation with putting GPU's on to motherboards so that they could utilize a more robust cooling solution. Set things up mechanically to allow users to use current socket 2011 coolers and water blocks.
ThomasS31 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
After a 7990 with a relatively good cooler???The could do better IF they want... seems they don't want this time. Which is a shame.
Or not wise as least. :)
1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Its all in the alloys they use in heat sink materials, copper is the best in thermo performance per price, I mean if you give me a brick of silver or gold I can make you a proper heatsink. Every metal's value is determined by its industrial application not by what women like to wear, that is the misconception, and of course availability or abundance on earth of the substance, and last but not least, the F@#king A$$holes that buy the metals as an investment and essentially stockpile the $hit because in reality they serve no purpose than screwing over industries and products that rely on said metals, and in turn screw the population that relies on the products. I think I made the point, we get sub par hardware issues for premium prices because some people can't make or keep money unless its weighted in a safe somewhere.The Von Matrices - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Just FYI, silver is the most thermally conductive element, but it's only about 5% better than copper. For all practical purposes there is no reason to build a computer heatsink out of anything more expensive than copper. Gold is only about 2/3 as thermally conductive as copper and aluminum is about 1/2 as thermally conductive as copper. There would be no point in building a gold heatsink over a copper one. It would look cool, but compared to copper it would be insanely heavy (over two times as heavy; imagine a 3kg graphics card) and perform worse.HisDivineOrder - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
AMD could have let the voltage levels go up and down to match the actual power required by the card. Instead, they focused on the fans because that's the easier one to add in after-the-fact. Because I believe the card was meant to have a lower voltage level and it wouldn't hit performance that could beat the 780, so they figured they'd go loud and hot and pray it held together.This thing is all duct tape and chopsticks, MacGyver'ed together. That's why the cooler is so inadequate to the task it is given. They didn't expect to be fielding such a hot and loud card. But management decided that actual performance (not performance per watt or performance per decibel) was infinitely more marketable.
They were probably right, but the cost to my sanity is worth far more than the differences between the R9 290 and the 780.
If you hold out hope that the custom-cooled versions of this will bring it down to sane levels, I hope you are right, too. I think that some custom versions of this card could bring it under control if they reduce the voltage levels along with their custom coolers.
I really wish AMD had a great blower design to go with all those open-air cooler cards to come.
lever_age - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
If I were in the market for a high-performance graphics card, I'd never buy these cards and use the stock coolers.These cards are making people seriously consider graphics card aftermarket air cooling, which is pretty sad. Or maybe not. I'm kind of curious about e-tailer sales data for Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme III, Gelid Icy Vision Rev. 2, Prolimatech MK-26, etc. Recent spike, or is this actually overblown a bit?
1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
No the smart person will buy the hydro copper EVGA NVidia cards if they want to go that route, as its less work in the long run and EVGA assumes the responsibility if anything is wrong with the water block itself, and I'm sure there is an ATI retail version from 1 of the companies. but anybody buying the highest end single GPU solution form either company in most likelihood is also a little insane enough to also use a 250-650$ case, with a 300-600$ motherboard.........you get the picture, In all likelihood they are running custom loops.tviceman - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Ryan I agreed with both your original conclusion and the amended one here. For 90% of potential customers, there has to be a good balance between performance, power draw, and fan noise.Many people on the forums dislike your conclusion because they're comparing your recommendation with regards to acoustic profiles on your current setup to past reviews of different cards on different setups. One thing that many of those (who disagreed) is that they aren't accounting for the expectation that comes with increasing the bar of cooling performance over the course of several generations of graphics cards.
tviceman - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
You have a choice between restaurant A and restaurant B. Both offer the same quality food and nearly the same menu. Restaurant A, though, has slower service (less "exclusive features) and also has obnoxious 24/7 construction going on INSIDE the restaurant. It is, however, 20% cheaper than restaurant B.If those are your only two choices to eat out, would you choose one of those restaurants or just not eat out?
DaTanMan - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
The issue with this analogy is that you sensationalize the 290's acoustics as "obnoxious 24/7 construction", which I'm sure NO ONE would want in their restaurant. The reality of the matter is that some people simply do not think that the cards are all that loud while others do. A better analogy would be if Restaurant A has music playing inside the Restaurant while restaurant B doesn't. Some people wouldn't mind the music while others would.tviceman - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
The noise of a bone saw is not comparable to the noise of music, even if it's as abysmal as elevator music.dylan522p - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
More like a restaurant with normal music vs one with obnoxiously loud and annoying music.The Von Matrices - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
How about a restaurant with karaoke; I would probably avoid that one.ThomasS31 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I prefer not to sit for long hours next to a vacuum cleaner... so I prefer quiet cards over preformance.But to add perspective, I prefer cards with performance and quiet operation together -> better cooling/cooler equipped cards.
B3an - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I agree the 290 is too loud. So i'm simply going to wait for custom cooling designs to appear before i pick up a couple of these cards. It may increase the price slightly, but even if it then costs the same as a GTX 780 it will still offer better performance at that price.gudomlig - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I have to agree that noise should be an important consideration. I'm very happy with my 7950 because it stays very quite no matter what I throw at it. I did play around with overclocking it and honestly the small increase in performance was not worth the increase in the noise from the fan needing to run faster. If I were to not have done any homework and went out and bought a 290 only to discover my most modern up to date graphics beast was as loud as a freight train, I'd have been super pissed. Bottom line, there are definitely those of us out that who do care about acoustics and do agree that a modern GPU should run reasonable quite.nevertell - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
As I already commented on the original review, nobody has a problem with acoustics when AMD does this, when the 480gtx came out, everyone had a rather strong opinion that the card was ridiculous. Of course, AMD has the value argument on their side, which nvidia rarely has.krumme - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
First off all. Thanx for the update.If the result for this is amd abandons bad blowers its super. Its about time.
If the result is users losing an ability to flip a switch and change profile to their personal preferences its a loss.
If the result is nv or amd beeing more carefull about using new technologies to controll power to maximize performance instead of a fixed core freq its a loss.
I know noise is personal. I own a very silent card that most can not even hear in idle. I unplug it entirely when i dont game. My dishwasher is the most silent on the market. My car is silent.
I want everything silent except myself.
Take care
frogger4 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I simply don't buy anything that doesn't have an open-air cooler now. I used to have a reference HD 6970, and that was simply too loud for me. It was so bad (in my opinion) that I modded it with an Arctic accelero cooler, and was really happy with it after that. I understand the argument that open air coolers spill hot air into the chassis, but that has been a complete non-issue. A chassis with good airflow and a graphics card with the largest open-air cooler you can get has proven to be a very good solution to me.I say all of this to make this point: I'm not concerned about how loud a reference blower card is, since I would always buy one with a much quieter custom cooler.
dylan522p - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Blower cards can be good if done right.Impulses - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Possibly, but it seems open air coolers always have much more potential... It's kind of natural after all, how do most enthusiasts cool their CPU? Big open air tower cooler. I don't see why we should favor blowers just to make up for bad PC cases.zanon - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Ryan, I'm glad you're soliciting feedback like this, it's noted and appreciated. With regards to the importance of acoustics, I think you'll find two major camps which diverge pretty heavily. Prefacing with a few points, obviously there will be *some* simple, raw noise level at which point it's unacceptable to anyone with hearing, the sort of profile sometimes found in components designed 100% purely for datacenter/industrial use with no humans around (or at least no humans not equipped with high grade ear protection). Also, I don't think you've formally designed a test for this yet, but it's worth noting too that the quality of the noise matters, not merely the decibels. Certain types of whines, high pitches, patterns, and so on can be vastly more annoying even at a low level then simple white noise, and decibel level alone wouldn't necessarily capture that. So with that aside:First camp is clearly what you fall into: users who are interested in primarily stock usage with speakers or open backed headphones, and/or in an environment with others around, for whom total system acoustics is a really, really important consideration. If it's loud to any real degree then it could range from immersion breaking to flat-out useless.
Second camp though consists of both users who go heavily custom or those like me with higher environmental tolerances. WRT the first, let's be honest: even though $400 isn't super ultra highest end, and even when the performance is really, really a good value, it's still a really rarified and self-selected market. While the average person never thinks about custom loops or third-party coolers or whatever, a buyer of a $350+ card, any $350+ card, is not the average person and I suspect there is a vastly higher incidence of customization there. For those users a good water loop for example can handle pretty much any level of heat and can do so quite quietly with the right components, so the real limiting factor is whatever limits the silicon itself has. A really solid card with a crap reference cooler they'd never use anyway is perfect. Also, while this is more the future don't forget about newer cable standards: with the kind of range we're going to be able to get from stuff like optical TB, it'll become more practical to have a system in a completely different place from the desk.
To the second I'll use myself as an example. My own computerspace is physically isolated, and while I have a decent sound system I'm using IEMs (Shure SE535s), which have a key selling point of great passive isolation. My phone calls are VoIP so my system alerts me and I can reply without taking them off, I don't get many deliveries but I've been working on wiring that to my LAN too. So it simply takes a comparitively much higher level of noise before I can even hear it, let alone care. All else being equal I'd pick a quieter system, and I definitely care about the noise profile, but the balance of accousts/performance will tend to weight more heavily towards the latter, that's one of the balances of my own use habits.
So I agree with you wanting to encourage AMD and Nvidia in particularly to keep a lid on noise, but at the high-end enthusiast level there certainly appears to be a significant group with different tolerances, either because of how they work or because of how they customize and build or both.
jenneth - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
"While the average person never thinks about custom loops or third-party coolers or whatever, a buyer of a $350+ card, any $350+ card, is not the average person and I suspect there is a vastly higher incidence of customization there."But that's purely a speculation on your part though. I generally spend more than $400 on video cards (though I usually upgrade once every three years or so) and I've never thought about water cooling. Furthermore, for people who have a decent audio system, noise do matter.
zanon - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
>But that's purely a speculation on your part though.No, it's not pure speculation. The objective fact is that products are being offered, which in turn means there is a market. Those companies aren't charities, if there was no money to be made the products would not last, but they have. Going by general trends period as well as normal economic logic, extrapolating that most of that sort of thing is going to the high end is not much of a stretch. If you want to argue though that 3rd party coolers, full loops and so on are being bought by people who get $100 cards then go for it.
>Furthermore, for people who have a decent audio system, noise do matter.
As I said, this is not necessarily true. Next time try reading the whole thing before responding. IEMs are absolutely "decent" or beyond decent, even before getting into $1000+ full custom plugs. A decent input source like an O2+ODAC and a set of good IEMs will be competitive with any headset on the market. Whether you want significant isolation or not and whether you like something in your ears or not is a matter of personal preference, but the fact remains that a significant number of people use an audio setup where room noise is massively reduced, with all the pluses and minuses that entails.
jenneth - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
>>No, it's not pure speculation.Again, you offer no solid facts to support your argument. In your original post you made it sound like $350+ video cards are ultra highend and are out of reach for the 'casual gamers.' That's my problem with your argument.
>>A decent input source like an O2+ODAC and a set of good IEMs will be competitive with any >>headset on the market.
I have a Sennheiser HD800 (which is an 'open' headphone), along with Luxman P-1u and PS Audio Perfectwave DAC (I usually do switch to Xonar STX for gaming though), so I have a fairly decent system, and yes, I do game on that system.
zanon - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
>Again, you offer no solid facts to support your argument.Again, you completely ignore it all. However, if you want solid numbers then we can do that too.
>In your original post you made it sound like $350+ video cards are ultra highend and are out of reach for the 'casual gamers.'
They are, and if you think otherwise then you really, REALLY need to get out of your bubble. For hard numbers we now have a really massive, wide based one: the Steam Hardware Survey (found here: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey). Go take a look at it, I don't think a lot of the type who would visit Anandtech at all have any idea exactly how out there they are. Of Steam's userbase, nearly TEN PERCENT is on INTEGRATED GRAPHICS. And not new Iris stuff either, but horrible old HD 3000/4000 crap. Look for $350-400+ cards (new, some of what we see there might be used/clearance if it's not current gen). You have to go down 7 places to find the GTX 670, at 1.48%. The next one, the 680, is another 16 places down at 1.09%, and it's all downhill from there. The 570 1.04%, the 580 is 0.72%, the 770 clocks in at a glorious 0.60%, and the 780 is too small to even make the top 60. AMD does even worse.
That is the reality: maybe 6-7% of the PC gaming market goes for these total, and an even tinier fraction are getting them within a generation of release.
>so I have a fairly decent system, and yes, I do game on that system.
I'm not sure what your point is with this. Of course open systems, or speakers, can be good also. That's what Ryan is using too. But you asserted that any "decent audio system" was very sensitive to noise, which is wrong.
jenneth - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
>> I'm not sure what your point is with this. Of course open systems, or speakers, can be good >> also.>> But you asserted that any "decent audio system" was very sensitive to noise, which is wrong.
My point is that a good open system (open headphones or near-field/Mid-range monitors) will always beat an IEM system. Now, a great CIEM like the 1plus2 would shrink the gap I admit, but those still wouldn’t beat an open system. What you consider to be a ‘decent’ audio system isn’t decent enough for me and others.
>> Look for $350-400+ cards… to find the GTX 670, at 1.48%. The next one, the 680, is another >> 16 places down at 1.09%, and it's all downhill from there… That is the reality: maybe 6-7% of >> the PC gaming market goes for these total, and an even tinier fraction are getting them within >> a generation of release.
And what percentage of those users have their cards on a water loop? Look, I generally agree that people who buy higher end cards are more willing to go with an aftermarket cooling solution, but I’m thinking you’re significantly overestimating their numbers. At any rate, don’t bother to reply, I’m not going to spend any more of my time talking with someone who’s so narrow minded. I think you’re the one that living in a bubble lol.
Impulses - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
While I agree with your general sentiments about IEM, I don't think they're even remotely competitive with the better open air headphones when itcomes to sound stage and positioning... Which is kinda crucial for a lot of types of gaming. Same for closed headphones really. In any case, custom loop WC is an extreme niche within a niche. If it wasn't we'd see a lot more cards sold with WC blocks pre-installed, or cards sold with no cooling... CPUs are sold with no cooling solution after all (OEM SKU etc), so it's hardly a liability issue.zanon - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
>I don't think they're even remotely competitive with the better open air headphones when itcomes to sound stage and positioning...Well, I think you're full of it. I'm also suspicious of anyone who uses terms like "sound stage" since that smells of audiophile. If you are a sane person instead though then my apologies.
>In any case, custom loop WC is an extreme niche within a niche.
That was merely one example, there are other aftermarket solutions too (of course, mostly we'll just see custom coolers shipped via non-ref designs in short order). I wasn't asserting that it was some majority of the market or anything of the sort. Rather, Ryan expressed surprise that there was that vocal a response from people with very different views. I was simply offering one perspective on why that was. Yes it's a niche, but as I said I suspect it's bigger (though still small) at the high end level, which these cards definitely are, and even more so probably a higher percentage are the kind of person who would love and read AT.
Impulses - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Have you actually tried comparing open air headphones vs IEM? I'm curious why you *think* I'm full of it... I'm not an audiophile, at least I don't think, but I do frequent audiophile boards in order to get a good value for my money (you inherently have to suss out a lot of hype and bs from the facts tho).I game with a pair of Beyerdynamic DT880 right now, and a Xonar STX, hardly high end by many people's standards (specially an audiophile). The pair works insanely better than most of the headsets I've tried tho, let alone IEM. I've tried Audio Technica's lower end models but the bass was just too weak, I've triedsome Sennheisers too.
I've got a pair of Etymotic hf5 IEM that I quite like (they retail for like $125+ but I got them during a sale for like $60), they're not even in the same realm when it comes to gaming but they're brilliant for music. I've tried some pretty good Philips Fidelio S which were a bit better than the Ety though still not on the level of the Beyers.
I wouldn't spend more than $300 on a pair of headphones, half that for anything portable that's more at risk (though the build quality and warranty on my V-moda M-80 was well worth $160); but I also do like to try out different stuff. I wanna try out Philips' X1 and Mad Dog planars. Not sure if that makes me an audiophile in your eyes but audio is just as important as video and I've learned in time that $300 on headphones or a display will last me way longer than $300 on any internal PC component (though I'll still spend up to that much per GPU for Eyefinity/Surround CF/SLI).
Cables are all from Monoprice btw. ;) Oh and I'll use Dolby Headphone processing on the STX (or not) depending on the game/engine, works better with some than others... I do think it helps with accurately positioning sounds at times tho (wouldn't bother with extra sound processing otherwise).
jenneth - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Impulses is right… please do yourself a favor and go do some research on this topic in places like Head-Fi or Gearslutz. You are really showing how little you actually know about this.Gunbuster - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Enduro broken and comments about it deleted from forum posts. Take a year to fix.Frame pacing in SLI broken and it takes tools from Nvidia and the community to bring it out. How long was this broken?
Now golden sample fan motors sent out for review. Called out immediately. How long did they think this one would have slid past unnoticed?
Whats the next "oops" for AMD?
davidpanz - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I have been gaming since the Atari 2600 days. I have owned just about every console released in the US. I also have been a PC gamer for a long time as well. As systems have gotten more powerful the noise has always gone up, whether console or PC. As an engineer out of NC State, the thermodynamics of the whole system has gotten more and more important. Last week, my son found the limit of his laptop, which has been reduced to scrap, due to the heat issue from it's gpu. (amazing how Minecraft and Terraria can get the igpu fired up) The heat/noise/power trifecta will reduce the life of any silicon, Red Ring of Death cost me 5 xbox360.While I full recognize I am in the minority, I could careless in the pc realm about noise on a gpu. I mod my system regardless of what I get. Air cooling has been insufficient for at least the last 5 years, if not longer, whether it was CPUs back in the Pentium Netburst days, or gpus now. CPUs have gotten better due to shifting priorities and abilities, to the point where gpus have taken over the CPUs in priority. This simply a shift in PC/tablet/smartphone space, where gaming is the defining measure of ability. GPUs will not be an easy fix, as CPUs have been.
Having said that, I game on a mini itx board, in a Liana Li Q-25b case, and a MSI 7970 GHz edition. It functions as my, server, htpc, a hyperv firewall, and gaming rig. It has to be stable/reliable(server), and quiet(htpc). I run a water cooling on the CPU and GPU, to an external box under the case, and the air cooling in the q25 cools the HD, ssd, and tuners quietly. The water cooler is dead quiet as well. It improves the life of the components greatly and solves the heat/noise issue. I only upgrade when I can get a water block for the gpu.
The only thing I see that will help this situation, is a desktop version on endure/optimus. that shifts the duties out more evenly and dynamically according to power usage across silicon. And that is only for help in light to medium duties over air cooling. For me, the power/heat/noise issue is a non issue for me.
Folterknecht - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
For me noise is an important point when dealing with a GPU - I used several aftermarket coolers on my cards from ArticCooling, Thermalright and Prolimatek in the past. Currently I m running a GTX570 Windforce from GB with a modded BIOS because GB screwed it up. The cooler is great it produces good thermals under idle and full load, but the thing was that the idle noise was unacceptable for me - it wasnt that loud but I could here the GPU when it was idle and I use a good case. GB in their wisdom just set the fans to 40% speed on idle and tools like Afterburner couldnt change that, that only left the option of a bios mod. Now my card is running at 20% fanspeed on idle and still stays between 35-40°C but I cant here it anymore.I can understand the debate and different opinions about noise under load but if a GPU is audible idling while I surf the web, write mails or work with office - FAIL. If a manufacturer isnt able to manage that today in a time where we have multiple clockspeeds and voltages compared to 10 years ago where hardware was running at fixed settings he deserves to be criticized.
Yojimbo - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Acoustics are very important for me. With my latest build, I specifically tried to design a rather quiet computer. I, however, am not a hardcore gamer (mostly what I play is Civilization V), and look for a video card around $150, not the $300+ cards discussed in this article. Ideally, I'd like it to be completely silent, but I accept that when I game there is going to be more noise than otherwise; I definitely want it managed, though.austinsguitar - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
i think it would be in amd's benifit to downclock both 290 and 290x... and market to buyers specificly stating "has the POTENTIAL to be highly OVERCLOCKED." this would give the general public a challenge and help the buying of the card. as is, it is too hot, and loud for novice buys! Please guys think about my statement!!austinsguitar - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
buyers...woopsnedjinski - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
How loud is loud is relative and subjective beyond the numbers. The reviewer says he uses headphones while gaming. So the audio from the game is blasting his ears but the card is too loud. Really? Okay then.If you have a decent case that's not positioned right next to your head how bad can it be? I've had loud fans before but that is usually easy to deal with by case location and positioning.
I do hear what you say about the average person expecting a quiet card right out of the box. But are we average computer users? And is this card made for the average user?
On the idea of noise vs performance. I definitely would choose performance and deal with the noise.
My own experience with Nvidia and ATI/AMD cards is that I have had several Nvidia cards fail physically, probably do to heat issues - most of these were EVGA cards for what that's worth. I have never had an ATI/AMD card failure - period. To me this indicates that ATI/AMD has always had a better handle on keeping their cards cool enough - even if the fan has to be loud. And Nvidia may go for performance but pay the price of physical failures.
Just a theory but it would be interesting to count historically how many Nvidia vs ATI/AMD card failures there have been and for what reasons.
Gigaplex - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Not all games blast loud volumes at all times. When there's a break in the audio, you'll hear the card ruining the ambiance.I definitely side on acoustics over performance. I can clearly hear my GPU fan ramp up from 20% to 25% on a fairly quiet AMD 7770. With no HDDs, a single 230mm case fan running at 300rpm, and a tower CPU cooler where the fan generally doesn't spin, it doesn't take much to be the dominant source of noise in the room.
Aikouka - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I prefer quieter computing, and I would avoid these cards if I was stuck with air cooling. However, I found it kind of odd that there's no mention of water cooling in the article. There is a lack of third-party air coolers right now, but EKWB already has a 290/290X water block out (whether you can find one is another story). Unfortunately, liquid cooling isn't necessarily for everyone, and if you don't already have a setup, it may seem cost prohibitive.Dribble - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I think most people care about acoustics. Imo most of those complaining where the loud minority of die hard fan boys most of which will never own a card that expensive. I bet almost everyone who gets one of these will either get it with an aftermarket cooler or put one on. If you spend that much money you want a better experience - that can't happen if your prettier graphics are cancelled out by an annoying whine.JDG1980 - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
The reference cooler is certainly disappointing, but I can understand AMD's position here. Sure, they could spend a few million dollars developing an awesome high-end blower like Nvidia did, but AMD is a smaller company than Nvidia and has more lines of business. That money could otherwise be spent on much more mission-critical areas, such as R&D on Excavator or GCN 3.0.In my opinion, AMD's real mistake was promoting and selling retail reference cards for the 290/290X in the first place. The reference design should have been strictly for internal development purposes, with perhaps a few cards being sold to those end users who wanted to use waterblocks. The first wave of retail releases should have been made by AIBs, using their own superior cooling designs such as the Asus DirectCU and MSI Twin Frozr. These should have been provided to reviewers.
Aftermarket cards have been superior to reference for a long time, but this is one of the first instances where the reference design is just flat-out inadequate.
BoFox - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
AMD should've allowed AIBs to release aftermarket versions at the same time (and actually send them to reviewers), while also providing reference versions to those who must have exhaust coolers.landerf - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I'm doubtful the majority saying that over 50db is acceptable have never owned a 290. That really is an insane noise level. Remember the increase is exponential.ddarko - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
Ryan,What bothers me about the explicit refusal to recommend the 290 card and your explanation above is the elevation of one specific factor above all else and using that as the basis to withhold a recommendation when the product is not designed around that factor. It would be one thing to withhold a recommendation for a case that is sold as muffling noise if it doesn't. That goes to the heart of the purpose of the product so if it's not silent, it's failed. But the 290 isn't designed as a silent card so your elevation of its acoustics above all else struck me as highly inappropriate. You pushed your personal preference above all end and I think that's inappropriate.
Don't get me wrong; I think it would have completely fair of you to go in-depth about how disappointed you were in the acoustic quality of the card and written pages and pages of it. But you crossed the line from reviewer to advocate with an personal agenda and opened a slippery slope. What next? Is Anandtech going to explicitly refuse to endorse high priced video cards like the Titan or the 780 Ti because you think reasonable prices are paramount and you can't recommend cards that cost $750 or $1000? I personally would never pay that much for a video card but I didn't think Anandtech should have concluded its reviews of those cards by saying "don't buy it, we can't recommend them because they're too expensive." I support what you did with those cards when it came to their pricing - point out how expensive they are, discuss their price/performance profile and then leave it to the READER to decide whether they want to pay the price for the performance. Why you didn't do the same with the 290 review - say the card is loud, even say it's too loud for you - is a mystery and frankly, your explanation above still doesn't justify the review's conclusion.
A5 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
If you've been reading, they don't really ever recommend the top-end video cards because of price.It sounds like you just want an article full of bar graphs, not a review of a product. Reviewer opinions are an extremely important part of the process - giving context to the numbers based on real-life experience with the hardware.
ddarko - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
If you were as careful a reader as you purport to be, you might have noticed Ryan didn't just refuse to recommend the 290, he actually wrote reader should not buy it:"To get right to the point then, this is one of a handful of cards we’ve ever had to recommend against. The performance for the price is stunning, but we cannot in good faith recommend a card this loud when any other card is going to be significantly quieter."
Show me a high-priced graphics review where Ryan urged the reader NOT to buy it. He doesn't. This is his conclusion to the Titan review:
"The end result is that Titan is targeted at a different demographic than GTX 580 or other such cards, a demographic that has the means and the desire to purchase such a product. Being used to seeing the best video cards go for less we won’t call this a great development for the competitive landscape, but ultimately this is far from the first luxury level computer part, so there’s not much else to say other than that this is a product for a limited audience. But what that limited audience is getting is nothing short of an amazing card."
Big difference between that and telling readers not to buy a card. He should have stuck with the approach he's taken in the past. I also question the motive to send a message to AMD: Ryan wrote in his review that "Next to price/performance the most important metric is noise, and by focusing on build quality NVIDIA has unquestionably set the new standard for high-end, high-TDP video cards." Well, if the reason to recommend against the 290 was to send a message to AMD about noise, then why hasn't he recommended against $1000 graphics cards in the past? By his own statement, price/performance is more important than noise yet he hasn't recommended against a card that, by his own description, " we have to contend with the fact that unlike any big-GPU card before it, Titan is purposely removed from the price/performance curve." Yet the Titan review did not conclude with a big "do not buy" statement.
ddarko - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
And as I said in my first post and will say again, I don't want a data dump. I want him to express his opinion but to do it consistency from review to review. His decision to recommend against a card did not follow the approach he has taken in the past with other cards that, by his own reviews, did not meet the factors he considers important.1Angelreloaded - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
This is why I have NVidia, and specifically always bought EVGA SC, FTW, Classified versions of the cards while using EVGA's Precision X controller software, In turn I can decide at any given specific time how I want the card to react, whether wearing a headset, or listening through speakers. Choice in my book is king, as a matter a fact you can feel like one when given choices.dyc4ha - Saturday, November 9, 2013 - link
I totally agree on the acoustics being important... but I think you MUST mention the fact that AMD's reference cooler is awful, and the fact that Nvidia's reference cooler is actually decent at stock settings. I feel like people who read AT knows about this and we are definitely not the reflective of the general populace. So if you explicitly recommend against the 290 REFERENCE board I would've been totally fine. BTW I also believe there is a fair number who buys reference top-tier boards will replace the reference coolers with water blocks or aftermarket heat-sinks anyway. I think the better message to send to AMD would be to match Nvidia's reference cooler performance.Impulses - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
That's the message I got from his review (s)... Maybe he has to be more implicit for some readers? I just don't see why AMD wouldn't encourage custom cooling solutions from their partners more quickly. Lack of choice is the real issue here, it's seriously stiffening the potential of their silicon. If they didn't wanna commit more resources to the blower design, then don't compound theproblem by pushing the bad design unto every partner.dyc4ha - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Hmm maybe I should be more clear: The message I got was: "too loud, sacrifice the perf (via conservative fan profile thus earlier throttles)" rather than "too loud, design a better reference cooler". Then again it could be just me?I agree, they should allow partners to launch reference boards and custom boards at the same time, that would have solved all the issues really... but what do I know about business mechanics and profit margins =/
Reynman - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Can someone possibly explain the variance between this image :http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph7481/59508... and the results in this review : http://www.anandtech.com/show/2977/nvidia-s-geforc... ?
Ryan Smith - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
In short:Different case
Different CPU cooler
Different test protocol
Different tests entirely (the old article was only FurMark)
They're not comparable and not meant to be comparable. Which is why we have the GTX 480 thrown in as a point of reference in the 290 review.
valkyrie743 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I owned a ref GTX 480 and i thought i was pretty loud. now back when i owned it, i made a custom fan profile and my temps never went past 75C while in game. granted for that card, thats really good and the noise was not that bad. i have no idea what the dB my card was running at. but i know it did not sound like what the 290 and 290X did. i went from the GTX 480 (in sli) to a single 680 and then i noticed how much louder it was. at night time though i would notice it allot when i turned my speakers down.IMO, i want a card that does not get hot and is not loud. so first comes heat, then noise, then power. if its a tad loud BUT keeps my temps at 75C or lower, im happy. but being that these 2 cards are so damn loud BUT cant keep the temps below 90C thats not right IMO. i dont care how many times they say the card is ok running at 90C. would you be ok if your car guy says yeah its ok that your car idle's at 4000RPM. while most cars down. it will wear down faster no matter what they say. plus i really dont like the fact that they are pushing this card to its threshold right off the bat. the 780 Ti temp target is 83. it hits that yes. but does not throttle the crap out of its clocks AND the kicker, if you raise the temp target to its max (95) the card still boosts way past its stated boost clock and still is able to stay below 85C without any help.
if they knew that these 2 cards 290 and the X, were going to be heavly dependent on temps and fan profiles, why did they ship these cards with crap HSF? why didnt AMD make their own Third part type cooler like ASUS, or MSI are making? i know amd is trying to steal the Price per performance market but hell. 20 bucks markup to keep the cards cooler than 85C is worth it imo.
and sorry for this dissertation. lol
yannigr - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
This is how to write an article. Yes Tom's Hardware found the problem, but the articles there where like written by Nvidia stuff.Anyway sound is going to be a more important matter in the future and custom coolers are going to be something more than just good looks. But for many people noise is not a problem. Today many are using tablets or laptops or, like me, a second ultra quiet PC for everyday use. Then they have another PC just for gaming or really heavy tasks like video encoding, photo processing. That PC can be much faster, with much more noise, needing much more power from the wall socket. I am pretty sure that someone who can afford a card like 290 or 780 does have enough money for a second quiet PC or a tablet or a laptop.
Lonyo - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
1) Ryan should be allowed to have his own opinion on the card and express that in his review2) Ryan's opinion should not dictate the conclusion of the review
3) This is not a failure of Ryan for having an opinion, this is a failure of the editorial process to not pick up on how opinionated the review came due to Ryan's focus on noise above other factors.
The review should have been fine first time round with better editorial control to temper/balance out Ryan's conclusion, but it seems that this was lacking in the review. It also seems to be lacking in the 780Ti review, which talks about the HD290X vs 780Ti while failing to mention the key difference between the cards, being $100.
In the 290 review, there is clear discussion of price differences and performance difference, and whether value for money is offered.
In the 780Ti review, there is no discussion of whether it is worth its premkium over the 290 cards of the 780.
These are the sorts of things that the editor should be catching to improve the quality of articles, so that this sort of post-review acknowledgement of the original review does not need to be made.
The Von Matrices - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
The 780Ti was explained many times in the review to be a card that is outside of the price/performance chart. It is the flagship product and not meant to have be a value proposition at all. The conclusion clearly states:"At $700 it’s by no means cheap – and this has and always will be the drawback to NVIDIA’s flagships so long as NVIDIA can hold the lead – but it also means that NVIDIA does need to take AMD’s Radeon R9 290 series into account. As such the 290X and the GTX 780, though lesser performing parts, will remain as spoilers for GTX 780 Ti due to their better balance of performance and pricing. All the while GTX 780 Ti stands at the top of the heap for those who want the best."
A5 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
So you're saying that Ryan should have to write the entire review, and then change the conclusions to match some nebulous general opinion instead of what he really thinks?I already know that nobody on this site reads bylines (see: almost every comment on the R290 review being addressed to Anand instead of Ryan), but they're there for a reason.
Laststop311 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Noise is very important to me. I leave my pc on 24/7 and it's right next to my bed so you best believe I pick all my components based on noise first and foremost. For any like minded readers like me this is my recommendation.If you only game at 1920x1080 and want a solid 60 fps with ultra details for current and near future games the GTX 760 is the best choice. If you want something that will be more future proof for this scenario pony up the extra 80 dollars and get the GTX 770.
If you game at 2560x1600/1440 and want a solid 60 fps with ultra details probably 95-97% of games will run like this with a GTX 780 and I would solidly recommend that over the GTX 780ti which is a whole 200 dollars over.
If you want to game on a 3840x2140 (4k) resolution there is currently no card that can sustain that res on ultra details at 60fps. I recommend 2x GTX 780 in SLI for this resolution. 2x GTX 780ti is overkill and the regular 780 in SLI will be enough.
Laststop311 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Unfortunately when I got my dell u3014 and my radeon 5870 was no longer cutting it my options were GTX 680 or GTX titan or radeon 7970 so the only card that gave the performance I needed was 1049 dollars. I probably could of skated by with the gtx 680 but the titan had just come out and i do like to contribute to folding @ home and things like that and loan my processing power out. Got a good 9 months of having the top performing single card which is pretty good in the pc world. There are some situation where the titan does drop below 60 fps but I wont be upgrading till maxwell comes out. Hopefully a nice 2560x1600 30 inch with gsync becomes available around the time maxwell does. That will be a potent combination.terabaSe - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Just get a Gigabyte Windforce edition. The 3x will do, they run silent and cool and they tend to be very cost effective. My last 4 cards, a mix of AMD and NVIDIA have all been those and you never have to worry about noise or temps again...varad - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Ryan,I loved your initial conclusion and acoustics is definitely high on my priority list.
I am guessing there are more people like me who do not generally write comments and mostly just read the reviews on various tech sites [like AT]. And to be honest, I come here to read your honest view/opinion and not something that is written to appease everyone [like the kind of balancing act being done in this article]. So, please do include your personal views in future reviews.
Thanks!
PolarisOrbit - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I have often felt that reviewers don't put enough value on non-performance based specs. Sound is the most relevant one for video cards, but for other types of products it can be battery life or temperature that is the relevant secondary characteristic.However, reading the conclusion on for the R290, it felt unfair to pan the whole product because it failed one area. If performance is good and price/performance is good that's an automatic rubber stamp of approval. The best way to handle it would have been to give a big caveat where there's a gaping hole in the product's overall value.
The way I rate video cards is like this (descending importance):
1) Price [I'm not going above $200]
2) Brand rotation [I have to alternate Nvidia and AMD so I have reasonably new versions of each brand for testing purposes]
3) Price/Performance
4a) DX/OGL support level
4b) Acoustics
4c) Secondary features [CUDA, Eyefinity, etc.]
5) Bundles
Death666Angel - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Great post!Like I said in a comment under the 290 article: I don't care about reference design loudness. If I buy a reference design card, it is because I will swap the cooler for an aftermarket solution like the Arctic Accelero stuff or (in my case) a water cooling block. If I buy a card for use as is, I wait for custom stuff like the Lightning series from MSI or the new Gigabyte OC'ed things. They are a bit pricier usually, but offer enough extras to justify it and in my experience, achieve better overclocks. And when I game I have my headset on (not noise cancelling) and don't hear anything of the PC anyway.
Kougar - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Since you asked for opinions... Acoustics are important to me, but in the case of the 290 specifically they wouldn't matter. From my point of view (assuming I was presently in the market) I would be buying a waterblock for the GPU regardless. So having the 290 offer such good value with a cheap cooler is great, because I'd be replacing it anyway. Watercooling would easily tame such a card and let it offer max performance all the time.As a GTX 480 FTW Hydrocopper owner I am very aware of what a good WC setup can do to incredibly hot/loud cards. Max performance, longevity, slightly lower power consumption, and most of all silent acoustics.... Been running it 24/7 folding with an overclock since day one and it's still running strong.
A5 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
That's a niche scenario and wouldn't change the conclusion. The people who are doing that already know to skip over the "acoustics/thermals" page anyway.dananski - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I care a lot about noise. Anything more than a whisper is irritating.I go to a fair amount of effort to make my PCs as quiet as is feasible - careful selection of components, swapping out fans for larger, slower ones, sound-proofing in the case... but quiet graphics cards have been very hard to come by, and usually even the quietest one (with sufficient performance to justify an upgrade) will overshadow all the other noise from the machine, even at idle.
I can see there's definitely a market for cards like the 290, but I really appreciate you making a fuss about acoustics, especially with the makers listening, because it really matters to me, and others, and it's not really something I feel they're addressing adequately.
HisDivineOrder - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Voltage is out of control, which explains a lot. I really wish they'd have worked in a system to get that more managed, so their power levels didn't skyrocket out of control as the card grows faster. They're at high levels for bottom end and it's making the high end really hot and loud.Moreover, as many others have said, I wish they'd put a quality blower on there.
Third parties might show up and save the day, but in the end most of them will be open air coolers that blow all that hot air into your case, which will increase the stress on your entire system's cooling. That will probably lead to louder volume from your entire system to help compensate for the reduced volume from the card(s!).
It is an irony to push TrueAudio while at the same time pushing a card that requires you to raise the volume to absurd levels to overcome the volume of the card(s!).
And what you said, Ryan, about this becoming the new norm is the most frightening part of the whole thing. Look at what nVidia did with the 780 Ti. They raised the fan speeds, raised the upper temperature, and increased the overall noise.
This is the slippery slope and AMD started out on it (again no less!) at a markedly high place. It's only going to get louder from here if they continue down this road. There really needs to be an accepted limit and they were pushing it before.
Now they're just making it louder. I mean, imagine that. The damn cards are actually louder than they were before and what they were before was unacceptable. How many more driver updates are going to "improve" the card with louder acoustics?
I really, really don't want this to be the norm going forward. Louder, hotter cards to try and keep up with competition that has a superior design. When nVidia overclocked the GK104 part to keep up with the Tahiti parts, they didn't push the acoustics or performance per watt argument in the wrong direction. They actually improved the argument.
But when AMD pushes Hawaii to get it up to Big Kepler levels, they seemed to have no options EXCEPT to worsen acoustics and performance per watt. That's just piss-poor planning.
bludragon - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Looking at the recent reviews, there are a couple of graphs I'd like to see:1 frame rate/power consumption.
2 frame rate/noise
Users could overclock/under clock or use a different coolong solution to move along the curve for each, but the curve itself will be fixed by the silicon
fredbloggs73 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I would also like to see how far you can push the recent generation of cards with some undervolting whilst keeping the stock clocks.And with this heat issue on the rise, I do worry that GPUs, when they move to smaller processes and higher transistor density, could end up like Haswell. Could this possibly happen?
Also could this heat issue just be due to transistor density. The 290x has 6.1 billion transistors compared the GTX780 with 7.1 billion transistors, while the 290x has a smaller die size (551mm^2 vs 424mm^2, respectively)?
The Von Matrices - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
This is already happening. Haswell and Hawaii are not anomalies, and this problem will only get worse in the future (without a massive breakthrough in controlling leakage). In the past, the leakage per transistor was halved when the transistor size was halved, which resulted in twice as many transistors in the same power envelope. Now, the leakage per transistor is remaining constant while the transistor size is shrinking, resulting in more heat in a smaller area. The only way to compensate is to reduce clock speeds, which diminishes the gains of going to a larger die.dkizzy - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Just wait for the customized cooling solutions from the manufacturers, problem solved.justaviking - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
THIS IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHY ANANDTECH.COM IS THE BEST.To me, the best aspect of AnandTech is the BLEND of objective analysis and opinion... and the clear distinction between the two.
Most of the reviews here are quite transparent in terms of what they test and how they do it. That makes it harder to fake favorable reviews (or at least the test results).
Then the writers go "beyond the numbers" and give you their impressions and opinions. I don't mind if they say, "According to the test results, Acme comes out on top, but I still prefer the other brand because of X, Y, and Z." For example, they'll explain that although two cards have the same volume level (db), one is more annoying because of the pitch, or is more irritating in how it changed suddenly rather than gradually. Things like that are more subjective and not revealed in the graphs and numeric values, but are good to know about, Sometimes it's simply that they've had good experiences working with a company, and that creates a personal bias. At least they're up front about it.
In the R9 290 review, not only did Ryan state his "too loud" opinion, he referenced it against other cards, indicating where he felt the breaking point was.
Everyone is free to have their opinion, and can disregard his "advice" if they want. But at least they can't complain later and say they weren't warned. And if you truly do value performance at any acoustic cost, then that of course is your choice.
So... THANKS AGAIN FOR ANOTHER GREAT REVIEW, RYAN. Keep up the good work, and continue to give us both the facts and your interpretation of them.
Achaios - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
@Ryan Smith:First off, I have been a big fan of Anandtech since 2008, and that b/c Anandtech was always many steps ahead of the competition in publishing accurate, unbiased and unambiguous reviews as well as giving away many OC or performance secrets.
As to the matter at hand: We the ppl who read this site every day are, for the most part, enthusiasts and avid overclockers. Do you really think that someone who goes so far in the pursuance of performance as to bother with Northbridge Latencies, Memory Overclocks and PLL voltages, would give a damn about how loud a GPU is?
In my rig, I have got installed Thermaltake Frio OCK (Overclock King) CPU cooler. At 2000 RPM, it produces 60 DB of sound. A card, therefore, that produces as much or slightly more sound is definitely not a problem or a concern, at least to me. I don't even use headphones while gaming. I just crank up the volume, and the HD sound of the game completely covers up the 60db of my CPU cooler sounds.
For me, there's only four things that really matter when buying a GPU: 1. Price, 2. Performance, 3. Operating temperature, 4. Overclocking headroom.
So yes, I will definitely buy either the R290 or R290X, but definitely I won't buy a reference card. As an enthusiast, I only buy cherry-picked chips such as the SOC special edition of Gigabyte's or the Classified edition of EVGA.
Sound pollution, unless it goes up to ridiculous levels (around 80db), is therefore not a concern.
Da W - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Agreed with your new conclusion.However, i find your GTX 780Ti conclusion pushes too much wieght on 1440p gaming. Seeing benchamrk results and how AMD scales better at higher res, you should at least say something along the lines of: "If you are gaming at 4k resolution, or using an eyefinity/surround setup, then AMD 290/290X offer better price/performance (at the cost of noise)".
Ryan Smith - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
That's a reasonable complaint. But as we stated in the article, we don't believe it makes any sense right now to do 4K gaming off a single card. The quality compromise required to achieve reasonable framerates is very severe for a single card, so to achieve both that high resolution and with high image quality settings, you need to go the SLI/CF route.All the more so when a 60Hz 4K monitor is north of $3000; a pair of 290Xs or 780 Tis is less than half the cost of the display itself. And that is why we are focusing on 1440p, as it's the highest 16:9 resolution a single card is going to be used with right now.
Sancus - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Speaking as someone with a 4K monitor, I wouldn't touch the 290X even though it has higher theoretical performance for one simple reason: It's completely impractical to CF them without water cooling due to the insane amounts of noise. And while water cooling is all well and good, SLI 780tis are still at a completely reasonable noise level and the price differential doesn't really mean anything in this segment of the market. So, unless you are specifically interested in a water cooling setup, the 290X is more or less one card only in my opinion.GaiaHunter - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Why did you guys simply ditched 3x1080p monitors or even 3x1440p monitors for 4K?theNiZer - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Ryan, I really feel you did the right thing pointing out how AMD became too greedy of performance at the expense of too high noise levels.I prioritize low noise levels in my gaming system as I have grown older. I've had HD4870 - even in crossfire, and they become very hot and the fan keeps spinning up and down from time to time out of nowhere. That should be history!
I want a sound balance (hehe) between performance and noise, and AMD should get that message!
Morawka - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
So AMD made the card even louder. This proves that iniital fan speed hike was a "knee-jerk reaction to Nvidia's Price Cuts. Also, i wouldnt worry about AMD or Nvidia saying "it's ok to run loud and hot" because after all, these products have to be watered down for mobile, and thermals and sound is very important there. This card is still a no-buy for me, and i hear custom cards are a long way off.Redstorm - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I game at night so acoustics are extremely important to keeping the household harmony intact. I was dead keen on upgrading to at 290X or 290 but after reading the reviews have decided they are too loud. I will wait to see the custom solutions and may even stump up the extra for a 780 Ti if the power/acoustics are better. I currently own the MIS 5870 lightning which is a custom cooler design. If MSI ship a GTX 780 Ti Lightning it will be very tempting or a 290X lightning, my choice will come down to performance vs acoustics with the latter being a show stopper if they are too loud.tisho75 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
So, I don't understand where is the problem: if the fan is too loud, then decrease its speed! Then Lower performance - ok, give me a better performance card for 399$ !brucek2 - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
The original review conclusion made a lot of sense to me. It would be silly to buy a reference board with an awful cooling system when its entirely likely you'll soon be able to buy that same performance with a better cooling system for not much more money.I'm also starting to wonder if maybe the logarithmic scale of db is doing readers a disservice. Anand's and other reviewer's bar charts make it seem like 57db is pretty much about the same as 60db, or very slightly different. In reality that's not true, its more like a 2x difference. Those bar charts would look & feel very different if the noise was reported in a linear vs logarithmic scale.
3lackdeath - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
AMD could've avoided this whole debacle if they had the launch the 290 series with the different AIB partners like how did with the 7 series.Simple start off with the aftermarket brands the launch the reference models later on.
YazX_ - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
i owned pair of EVGA 560 GTX which didnt have ACX coolers back then, when i bought the first one, i didnt consider the noise as a big deal, it was too loud and bothered me but i carried on and bought the second one after prices went down, i made THIS trade off to get another 560 GTX than upgrading to a quieter solution, i was tempted by the price and performance i would get. Anyway, things got really ugly while fans are on 60%, i had to get rid of them and upgrade to better cooling solution.eventually I got Gigabyte 770 GTX Winforce 3x as i heard its the quietest cooling solution available and indeed it is.
Eventually, i learned my lesson and would never ever make that trade off and get a noisy card. first thing i look at when i shop for a card is the cooling solution.
YazX_ - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
Yah and btw , this remind me of Nvidia FX 5800, Nvidia took the criticism well and made this funny video if some of you do remember:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOVjZqC1AE4
sheh - Sunday, November 10, 2013 - link
I found it unfortunate that CPU and GPU manufacturers always seemed interested only in pushing speeds up, but never noise down. If you have +20% for a new generation, why not turn it into +10% performance and -5% noise? The situation may have changed some with CPUs, partly due to more mobile/power-efficiency focus, but desktop GPUs seem exempt.At minimum I'd want to see, in both CPUs and GPUs, good dynamic software-configurable noise/performance control, with gradual transitions, etc.
And where's that purported membrane-based air moving fan-replacement technology already?
just4U - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Ryan,Your review made sense to most of us and your opinion was coming from personal preference on noise issues.. I think most of us understood that from your review. Also saw the high marks you gave the card in other areas. It was an excellent review in my opinion and balanced.
kucingorange - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
I think that in order for the gamer to be satified, the need to use the loud active speaker or good headphones that the fan noise is not a problem.Fan noise is very disturbing for a HTPC, but the HTPC will not use the R9 290. And while working and browsing the fan noise will not be that loud, so the conclusion is weird like nvidia fanboy written..
AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Has anyone ever considered that AMD might have _purposefully_ used a bad cooler because they want their partners to sell more boards (and have more partners to carry their boards) and that, compared to previous generations of cards, they might be earning more money per partner card sold?just4U - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
not really... initial launches almost always come with the reference design with no aftermarket solutions. Those cards have a tendency to stick around thru-out the life of the product...as lemons really.. so it would be smart of Nvidia and Amd to have a higher end cooler design.. and simply scale back as their partners implement their own stamps on a card.BlakKW - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Noise is very important to me...I choose my Asus 7950 Direct CU primarily for the quiet cooling solution. However, what I don't necessarily agree with is the focus of your review(s) upon noise when we're talking about a new reference card...I mean, who buys these things anyway, except people who want to take it apart and add a WC solution?In my mind, reference solutions are never ideal, or even good, and I felt that your harping on this was overdone considering most people will not be buying reference cards...
LedHed - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
The only thing I got out of this "article" besides the fact that AMD is scrambling after the 780 Ti numbers came out (all the numbers (FPS/Thermals/Acoustics/etc)) is that AnAndTech is now trying to please the trolls with their previously data back conclusions. Now of course some amount of opinion is always part of a conclusion, but I have been on this site for over a decade and this is the first time I literally slapped myself in the forehead when reading an article. You can't please everyone and you shouldn't be taking a tally of negative feedback vs. positive to figure out if you "did it right". You (AnAndTech) should continue to write your articles as you always have (backed with data and knowledgeable insight) and let the comments be their own entity, not involved with the review at all (even with a revised article like this). I believe some of this link applies to what you all just did with this "article" : http://gradschool.about.com/od/publishing/a/reject...BTW, I own a 480 (as a backup) and that thing is ridiculous power hungry and hot (though it can be "tamed" with aftermarket solutions). However even bringing up the notorious 1st revision of Fermi should make AMD ashamed to release such a card in the 4th Quarter of 2013 with how far we have come in the engineering of heat transfer.
geniekid - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
For me, (since you asked for personal opinion) the noise is a complete deal breaker. Drowning out the noise is not an acceptable solution to me.Interestingly, my loudest card is the one I currently use (a MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti-448). When put it in an Antec SOLO II the open cooling style of the card just put too much heat into the case and the fans quickly spun up to maximum to deal with it. After I moved it into a Fractal Design R3 and installed a side fan pulling air out, the card became one of the quietest I've ever owned. What's funny is that the 560Ti was replacing a blower-style PNY GeForce GTX 9800 and the Antec case was able to muffle the blower-style card extremely well.
I guess the moral of the story is that the sound profile of a particular graphics card can change drastically depending on your case/configuration. Open style cards need *open* cases with lots of airflow and blower style cards are better put in *closed* cases.
douglord - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
Anand - I love you guys - but you really missed the boat on this article.Go back and read Tom's. The issue was never with the cherry picked samples AMD provided you. It was with the real chips on real cards that we can buy.
The driver updates really prove my point. They have almost 0 impact on the cherry picked AMD reference cards. The retail cards have lower binned chips that run hotter, and lower speed fans. The new AMD drivers are not a solution. The make these fans run at 55% of peak capacity instead of 40% - and the cards are still 5%-10% slower then retail.
Rather than worry about people saying price and performance are all that matter and noise doesn't, why don't you focus on the con game AMD is playing to get your reviews to show their card beating Titan.
Or how about we ignore all of these reviews and you do a 780ti vs 290x faceoff once retail boards with aftermarket cooling solutions are available?
gamoniac - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
I once purchased a single-fan HD6870 only to realize it totally undermine all the effort I had put into making my case quiet. I returned it and ordered a different one. So, acoustic is pretty high up on my requirement list.Grit - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
For what it's worth, noise is a deal breaker to me. So much so that I finally went to one of Asus' DirectCU format cards. I won't ever go back to a stock cooler format.What perplexes me is why so many companies make an enclosed water cooling solution for CPUs but not GPUs. I'd think on of the GPU distributors would have tried it by now. We already have them putting out cards with water cooling blocks installed.
DPete27 - Monday, November 11, 2013 - link
1) I wouldn't trade my perfectly silent Asus GTX 660 TOP for anything. Best GPU purchase I've made. I'm not sure a "silent" GPU is a necessity, but that should be the target.[Disclamier:] I don't game with headphones so I need my PC to be quiet.
2) The fact that the 290/X reference coolers need to be this loud to achieve 85C temps is a testament to how underdesigned they are. There's still a maximum operating frequency on the Core/Memory, but the reference cooler isn't strong enough to dissipate the load.
3) I don't like AMDs new "target temperature" approach. Even if the components are made to run at those temps for a lifetime, they'd still statistically last longer if they were cooler. Hotter temps = hotter exhaust air. For these reference blower designs, that might not be a problem, but for the axial fan custom coolers that will eventually come out, that's a real problem because all that heat goes into your case. Obviously, I'd expect the custom coolers to be in the 70-75C range, but that loops back to #2 above.
ludikraut - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Noise has zero bearing on my computer purchasing decisions. My case is in my basement and my actual office area is on the floor above, with cables running from the PC case up into my office. Any PC I deploy competes with the server and network racks it is sitting next to in terms of noise. Given the screaming fans on 1U, 2U and 4U enclosures, something like the R9 290 wouldn't even appreciably add to the existing din. :-)However, if it was to go into my office, I'm sure a decent sound-proofed case would go a long way towards making it acceptable. If it still was too loud, then a third party cooler would do the trick, I'm sure. Actually, given the potential shown by TH of adding a third party cooler to an 290, I think I'll end up going that route, just for performance sake.
l8r)
nfriedly - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I agree with your original conclusion, Ryan. That card was too loud, and not something I would buy or recommend to anyone I know.Waikano - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
I had an NVIDIA 275 that I found to be too loud at load, am so much more content with the acoustics of my current 660ti that it replaced. It's not silent but at least tolerant. Acoustics matter to me, and appreciated the insight of your original review. Would like to see AMD return to it's glory days when efficiency mattered and they were competitive with NVIDA in that department. It's almost like they have swapped places in this department.toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, November 12, 2013 - link
Never had a gpu noise problem. My problems have always been with loud case fans that don't flow much air or they go bad really fast.Silma - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
I value accoustics way more than a few additional fps. Can't enjoy a game or anything else with tiring and distracting noise.arjunp2085 - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Anand / RyanI would love to see a comparison of the 290 , 290x 780, 780 Ti with water coolers working efficiently. I believe that anyone spending $600 on a Gfx card would be able to spend an additional 100-200$ for a cool setup.
Further i would love to see if there is any performance increase due to increased cooling( With respect to boost states both Nv and AMD.
Any comments please let me know
Thanks,
Arjun
yhselp - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
I thought that this matter, and the direction we should be moving to (less noise), was already set. I don't mean to sound rude, but it's frankly absurd and utterly disappointing that some people apparently don't care about noise at all and are willing to buy a card with such a poor cooler. Reference designs are coming soon after all.It's not crucial that AMD up their game, why would they if there are enough partners to do great designs for them; it's just that such poor reference designs shouldn't make it to market. More alarmingly, with the on-going trend of open-cooler designs I fear that the art of the blower would be lost, and the end user will only suffer from this.
Personally, I have an exceptionally hard time of letting go of my reference semi-blower/open 560 Ti, that cooler is so silent that even open-air coolers (that I've tried) can't beat it. The very thought of using a louder card is so depressing I can't bear it, and while that is a hyperbole it's closer to reality than you might think...
MadMinstrel - Sunday, December 8, 2013 - link
As a reviewer you shouldn't concern yourself with sending messages at all. To do so is inappropriate and arrogant. It's the same as saying 'Hey, that stuff I wrote is not actually true - I skewed the review because I want the next product to my personal liking'.