MSI R9 290X Lightning - Performance Test
Introduction
The MSI R9 290X Lightning is the first graphics card from MSI in the Radeon R9 series that features its trademark TriFrozr cooling solution. It is built to minimize the shortcomings of the AMD’s latest graphics card which is extremely hot and loud. MSI also loaded the card with the highest quality Military Class 4 components which includes the Copper MOS, Hi-c CAP, New SFC, and Dark Solid CAP to ensure the best stability and quality as well as the longest lifetime. The R9 290X Lightning also has many other overclocking features such as 12+3 power phase design, 12-layer heavily customized PCB, LN2 switch, Triple Overvoltage, Triple Temp Monitor, and V-Check point. You have all the formulas of a card to break world records. Equipped with their brand new cooling system and various other overclocking-oriented components, is the MSI R9 290X Lightning the best graphics card that money can buy?
Product Link MSI Global R9 290X LIGHTNING
Suggested Retail Price RM 2,599
Specifications
GPU-Z Information
The MSI R9 290X Lightning offers 2816 unified shaders, 64 ROPs, 176 TMUs, and 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 512-bit memory bus. MSI bumped the GPU to 1080 MHz, up from 1000 MHz from AMD’s reference Radeon R9 290X. However, MSI didn’t increase the memory clock for this card out of the box, but it stuck with the stock 5000 MHz (effective).
Unboxing
This gigantic graphics card comes a massive box illustrated with an F35 Lightning II aircraft. MSI decided to make the packaging looked more premium but we found that the glossy outer cardboard is too fragile and will break easily during unboxing of the graphics card.
The rear of the box describes some of the key features of the graphics card along with a breakdown diagram of the TriFrozr cooler showing what is behind the cover.
Inside this large box there is another box which contains the graphics card and a drawer box that stores the accessories.
Moving on to the card itself, we see the MSI R9 290X Lightning in all its beauty. The first thing that you will notice is that this graphics card comes with a huge 3-slot TriFrozr cooler. There are three fans attached on the cooler. One small 80 mm yellow fan in the middle, sandwiched by two 90 mm black fans. The speeds of these fans are controllable with the included MSI VGA Fan Control software. MSI implements Propeller Blade Technology to improve the airflow.
The Radeon R9 290X GPU chip is soldered at the middle of the graphics card. Based on AMD’s Hawaii XT, the R9 290X will support AMD's TrueAudio, Mantle, DirectX 11.2, and bridge-free Crossfire technology using CrossFire Direct Memory Access aka XDMA. The fully customized PCB features a beefy 13+2 phase VRM to deliver a precise digital power for superior efficiency, stability, and performance so that you won’t need to worry about power delivery under extreme conditions.
The picture above shows a diagram of the card’s power delivery design courtesy of MSI.
There are three V-Check points on this side of the card to attach the voltage measure cables. You can also see three PWM fan connectors.
Generally, there are three choices of GDDR5 memory chips for graphics card. It is known that the Elpida chip really doesn’t seem to have a lot of potential for overclocking, and the Hynix IC has a good overclocking headroom but lacks of performance-per-clock efficiency. MSI decided to use the Samsung-FC03 for their R9 290X Lightning because it is the best performing IC among these three memories.
The graphics card draws power from two 8-pin and one optional 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The 6-pin PCIe connector is only required if you want to push the RAM and the GPU clock speed higher.
There is no CrossFire connector found on the graphics card. With R9 290 Series, AMD started to transfer multi-GPU data via the PCIe slot interface of the card. You have a tiny jumper switch that allows you to toggle between two modes: “LN2” mode and “Original” mode. The liquid nitrogen (LN2) jumper switch unlocks restrictions on temperature limit and overcurrent protection (OCP) so you can unleash full power from the GPU. The “Original” mode sticks to 20% power limit.
The Triple Load Level Indicator offers an instant and easy-to-understand display of current GPU load levels. For starters, if the LED glows red, this means that the R9 290X Lightning is under heavy load, Blue for medium and Green for light load.
The rear I/O panel includes a pair of gold-plated Dual-link DVI-D ports, a HDMI port and a DisplayPort. These interfaces support up to three monitors simultaneously for Eyefinity setup.
Let’s take a closer look at the MSI’s most advanced cooler, the TriFrozr. The cooler is consisted of two massive aluminium fin arrays that are interconnected by two 8 mm and four 6 mm heat pipes. The nickel plated copper base has a large surface to absorb the heat generated by the GPU. The heat is then conducted to the aluminium fins and eventually dissipated by the tri-fan system.
The front heatsink dissipates the heat generated by the memory and the VRM modules.
The black anodized aluminum backplate dissipates the heat generated by the PWM and helps to protect some of the components on the rear of the graphics card.
As for accessories, the R9 290X Lightning comes with the user manual, the Quick User’s Guide, the Certificate of Quality and Stability, three V-Check point cables, a pair of 6-pin-to-8-pin power cables and a molex-to-6-pin-PCIe Y-cable. Also included is a MOSFET heatsink, which comes in handy for watercooling and liquid nitrogen users. This heatsink is used if you remove the stock cooler and install either non-full cover water block or LN2 pot.
Test Setup
Testing Methodology
The Intel Core i7 4770K processor was overclocked to 4.625 GHz while all the graphics cards used were operating at stock clocks and stock cooler on air cooling. The MSI R9 290X Lightning was set to “Original” mode. Ambient temperature was around 30°C throughout the benchmarks.
The settings for in-game benchmarks are listed in the table above.
Software & Tools
MSI Afterburner
- a tweaking tool for overclocking, overvolting, power control and fan speed adjustment through the user-friendly screen panel.
MSI VGA Fan Control
- MSI's exclusive software and only for R9 290X LIGHTNING.
- Temperature of GPU and PWM on the interface.
- Control the fan speed via two PWM controllers automatically or manually.
Introduction
The MSI R9 290X Lightning is the first graphics card from MSI in the Radeon R9 series that features its trademark TriFrozr cooling solution. It is built to minimize the shortcomings of the AMD’s latest graphics card which is extremely hot and loud. MSI also loaded the card with the highest quality Military Class 4 components which includes the Copper MOS, Hi-c CAP, New SFC, and Dark Solid CAP to ensure the best stability and quality as well as the longest lifetime. The R9 290X Lightning also has many other overclocking features such as 12+3 power phase design, 12-layer heavily customized PCB, LN2 switch, Triple Overvoltage, Triple Temp Monitor, and V-Check point. You have all the formulas of a card to break world records. Equipped with their brand new cooling system and various other overclocking-oriented components, is the MSI R9 290X Lightning the best graphics card that money can buy?
Product Link MSI Global R9 290X LIGHTNING
Suggested Retail Price RM 2,599
Specifications
GPU-Z Information
The MSI R9 290X Lightning offers 2816 unified shaders, 64 ROPs, 176 TMUs, and 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 512-bit memory bus. MSI bumped the GPU to 1080 MHz, up from 1000 MHz from AMD’s reference Radeon R9 290X. However, MSI didn’t increase the memory clock for this card out of the box, but it stuck with the stock 5000 MHz (effective).
Unboxing
This gigantic graphics card comes a massive box illustrated with an F35 Lightning II aircraft. MSI decided to make the packaging looked more premium but we found that the glossy outer cardboard is too fragile and will break easily during unboxing of the graphics card.
The rear of the box describes some of the key features of the graphics card along with a breakdown diagram of the TriFrozr cooler showing what is behind the cover.
Inside this large box there is another box which contains the graphics card and a drawer box that stores the accessories.
Moving on to the card itself, we see the MSI R9 290X Lightning in all its beauty. The first thing that you will notice is that this graphics card comes with a huge 3-slot TriFrozr cooler. There are three fans attached on the cooler. One small 80 mm yellow fan in the middle, sandwiched by two 90 mm black fans. The speeds of these fans are controllable with the included MSI VGA Fan Control software. MSI implements Propeller Blade Technology to improve the airflow.
The Radeon R9 290X GPU chip is soldered at the middle of the graphics card. Based on AMD’s Hawaii XT, the R9 290X will support AMD's TrueAudio, Mantle, DirectX 11.2, and bridge-free Crossfire technology using CrossFire Direct Memory Access aka XDMA. The fully customized PCB features a beefy 13+2 phase VRM to deliver a precise digital power for superior efficiency, stability, and performance so that you won’t need to worry about power delivery under extreme conditions.
The picture above shows a diagram of the card’s power delivery design courtesy of MSI.
There are three V-Check points on this side of the card to attach the voltage measure cables. You can also see three PWM fan connectors.
Generally, there are three choices of GDDR5 memory chips for graphics card. It is known that the Elpida chip really doesn’t seem to have a lot of potential for overclocking, and the Hynix IC has a good overclocking headroom but lacks of performance-per-clock efficiency. MSI decided to use the Samsung-FC03 for their R9 290X Lightning because it is the best performing IC among these three memories.
The graphics card draws power from two 8-pin and one optional 6-pin PCIe power connectors. The 6-pin PCIe connector is only required if you want to push the RAM and the GPU clock speed higher.
There is no CrossFire connector found on the graphics card. With R9 290 Series, AMD started to transfer multi-GPU data via the PCIe slot interface of the card. You have a tiny jumper switch that allows you to toggle between two modes: “LN2” mode and “Original” mode. The liquid nitrogen (LN2) jumper switch unlocks restrictions on temperature limit and overcurrent protection (OCP) so you can unleash full power from the GPU. The “Original” mode sticks to 20% power limit.
The Triple Load Level Indicator offers an instant and easy-to-understand display of current GPU load levels. For starters, if the LED glows red, this means that the R9 290X Lightning is under heavy load, Blue for medium and Green for light load.
The rear I/O panel includes a pair of gold-plated Dual-link DVI-D ports, a HDMI port and a DisplayPort. These interfaces support up to three monitors simultaneously for Eyefinity setup.
Let’s take a closer look at the MSI’s most advanced cooler, the TriFrozr. The cooler is consisted of two massive aluminium fin arrays that are interconnected by two 8 mm and four 6 mm heat pipes. The nickel plated copper base has a large surface to absorb the heat generated by the GPU. The heat is then conducted to the aluminium fins and eventually dissipated by the tri-fan system.
The front heatsink dissipates the heat generated by the memory and the VRM modules.
The black anodized aluminum backplate dissipates the heat generated by the PWM and helps to protect some of the components on the rear of the graphics card.
As for accessories, the R9 290X Lightning comes with the user manual, the Quick User’s Guide, the Certificate of Quality and Stability, three V-Check point cables, a pair of 6-pin-to-8-pin power cables and a molex-to-6-pin-PCIe Y-cable. Also included is a MOSFET heatsink, which comes in handy for watercooling and liquid nitrogen users. This heatsink is used if you remove the stock cooler and install either non-full cover water block or LN2 pot.
Test Setup
Testing Methodology
The Intel Core i7 4770K processor was overclocked to 4.625 GHz while all the graphics cards used were operating at stock clocks and stock cooler on air cooling. The MSI R9 290X Lightning was set to “Original” mode. Ambient temperature was around 30°C throughout the benchmarks.
The settings for in-game benchmarks are listed in the table above.
Software & Tools
MSI Afterburner
- a tweaking tool for overclocking, overvolting, power control and fan speed adjustment through the user-friendly screen panel.
MSI VGA Fan Control
- MSI's exclusive software and only for R9 290X LIGHTNING.
- Temperature of GPU and PWM on the interface.
- Control the fan speed via two PWM controllers automatically or manually.
via Hardware Forums http://ift.tt/1h8523B
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