ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC Review

Test Setup

ASUS R9 290X DirectCU II OC
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.6GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64  

Overclocking

The reference 290X had no real overclocking benefit to speak of due to the incredibly high heat already being pushed out by the Hawaii core. With the DCUII we have a factory overclock, but even then there is enough headroom to squeeze another 100MHz from the card. 

Memory overclocking was problematic as it froze so often we ended up with the choice of overclocking the memory of the GPU Core, and after some testing it was clear that the GPU Core overclock gave much higher performance increases, so we stuck with that as our overclock of choice.

Finally we usually use Afterburner for our overclocking, but on the 290X DCU2 it was incredibly unstable so for this particular card we’d recommend sticking with the ASUS GPU Tweak software.

Temperatures

The only real change between the Uber and Silent modes is the temperatures and thus the amount of noise. There was no real overclocking benefit to be had. As you can see you definitely have a choice to make. The Silent mode is quiet, but the card is unbelievably hot. So hot that our RAM sticks were warm to the touch. Whereas the Uber mode drops the temperatures significantly but at the expense of extra noise.