PowerColor R9 290X PCS+ Review
Test Setup
PowerColor R9 290X PCS+
Intel Core i7-3960X @ 4.6GHz
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Corsair Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64
Overclocking
Out of the box the PCS+ has a decent lick of speed, but as always we want to see if we can do a little better. Initially there wasn’t much else to be had, a mere 60MHz, but a microscopic boost in voltage was enough to push the chip up to the 290X high-point of 1150MHz. No matter what we did it wouldn’t go further though, giving artifacts despite having plenty of thermal headroom. It was good to see an extra 200MHz on the GDDR5, which is something that, MSI Lightning apart, we haven’t seen enough of on the Radeon cards.
Temperatures
Speaking of thermal headroom, the cooler on the PowerColor R9 290X PCS+ is frankly ludicrous. On auto fans (which only hit 64%) and an hours worth of Unigine Valley we only hit 74°C. 20 degrees below a reference card. Amazing performance.
