Asus Radeon R9 290X DirectCU 2 OC 4GB GDDR5 PCIe

Overview

TechSpot Metascore

Based on 13 expert reviews

Excellent:

7
Good:

5
Average:

0
Bad:

1

Pros:

Excellent build quality
Increased performance due to a much better cooler than the reference design.
Great value

Cons:

Runs quiet or cool, not both.

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Last revision on September 8, 2015

Reviewers Liked

Excellent build quality
Increased performance due to a much better cooler than the reference design
Great value
Low temperatures during gaming with the performance BIOS
Overclocked out of the box

Expert reviews and ratings

The excellent AMD Hawaii GPU is finally getting the treatment it deserves with custom cards hitting the market in force, now. With this surge comes better cooling, defeating the main argument against the 290 series, and quite reasonably too. Stock...

By PC Authority on June 13, 2014

Asus addresses the heat issues of the Radeon R9 290X with its DirectCU II cooler.It would be a nearly impossible task to name the perfect video card.While some cards are better than others, every card has its flaws. The reference Radeon R9 290X was no...

By VR-Zone on January 24, 2014

AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's new Hawaii GPU, the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months). Using 6.8 billion transistors, the GPU is built on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC, Taiwan. It...

By techPowerUp! on January 21, 2014

The first waves of AMD partner 290 cards are being released this month, and today we follow up on our Gigabyte and Sapphire reviews taking a look at the latest card from ASUS, the R9 290X Direct CU II OC. This card ships with a proprietary cooler...

By Kitguru.net on January 09, 2014

When the R9 290X arrived it was clear that the Hawaii GPU had enormous potential, and many results were impressive if not jaw-dropping, but it was clear that AMDs decision to not only have the card run so darn hot, but stick such a truly woeful cooler...

By Overclock3D on December 29, 2013

Asus R9 290X DirectCU II OC is an excellent implementation of the AMD's flagship GPU. The DCII cooler is making a great job although at the expense of some noise in overclocking. The card is pretty quiet both in silent and performance mode.The...

By reviewstudio.net on December 19, 2013

The R9 290X GPU is known to become rather hot and cooling this chip with a reference and even a custom aircooler can be quite a challenge. In almost any case you will see thermal throttling. In this article we're going to compare the results of an ASUS...

By Ocaholic on August 05, 2014

We've recently been taking an in-depth look at the new ASUS STRIX GTX 780 OC 6GB DirectCU II video card in multiple testing and gaming scenarios. In our initial evaluation we were allowed to provide for you an early full-evaluation of this new video card...

By HardOCP on July 23, 2014

ASUS' pair of Matrix cards are, once again, extraordinary products. The video cards target overclockers of both the more and less extreme variants. Regarding the overclocking aspect, the Matrix GeForce GTX 780 Ti does not offer higher overclocks when...

By uk.hardware.info on May 05, 2014

When AMD introduced its new Radeon 290 and 290X flagship cards at the end of 2013, the cards were welcomed by many hardware enthusiasts. As usual with new releases there were minor flaws and points to be improved, the biggest one being temperature and...

By uk.hardware.info on March 28, 2014

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