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Today from HIS we have their latest take on the Radeon R9 290X which they call the Hybrid IceQ. Using liquid HIS hopes to deliver the coolest, quietest and best performing R9 290X money can buy. With the recent arrival of the GeForce GTX 980 they certainly have their work cut out, so let’s see what they came up with... It is hard to believe one year has passed since AMD released Radeon R9 290X into the wold. The 290X just doesn’t feel like it has been around for that long, at least not to me anyway. Perhaps that is down to the fact for at least half of its life pricing was so heavily inflated that most gamers ignored the 290X.  Having first reviewed it back in October 2013 we claimed it was the high-end graphics card to buy. This was the general consensus at the time as well and why wouldn’t it have been, the 290X provided GeForce GTX Titan like performance for nearly half the price. The following month AMD went one better with the vanilla R9 290 offering similar performance to the ‘X’ version but with $100 slashed off the price tag. Again we gave it a high praise and recommended gamers everywhere get one. Sadly the excitement was short lived as pricing skyrocketed due to short supplies blamed by the crypto currency mining boom. Eventually things did settle down and AMD’s high end R9 GPUs could be purchased at or near the MSRP. Unfortunately while pricing was high AMD’s board partners for the most part held off delivering special edition versions of the R9 290X. This was a shame because although the 290X was blistering fast it does have a problem with heat, as any graphics card with a TDP rating of 290 watts would. Heat issues generally cause noise problems and AMD’s own reference cooler was woefully inadequate. Not only was it loud under load, but caused the 290X to run excessively hot causing throttling issues. AMD’s board partners solved this issue for the most part with massive heatsinks riddled with copper heatpipes cooled by a battery of fans.  Designed to operate at up to 1000MHz these upgraded coolers allowed manufacturers to factory overclock their cards to around 1040 - 1050MHz. Currently such a card will cost around $550, while MSI has pushed their 290X Lightening to 1080MHz for an asking price of $650. What if you want a 290X that is even faster but at the same time much quieter? Seems like an impossible dream, but HIS has been working hard to make it a reality. Enter the HIS Radeon R9 290X Hybrid IceQ 4GB graphics card, designed to operate at 1100MHz out of the box while making less noise than any other 290X out there. As you might expect in order to achieve this HIS has turned to a liquid-cooled solution, not dissimilar to what AMD were forced to do with the 295X2. |
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BMAN61 |
Posted on: 10/29/2014 09:06 PM
Sorry folks; but if I'm to put out $700 for a quality GPU (and waterblock) it had better cool a heck of a lot better than this one does, 80 degrees at full load - give me a break. While I'm still rocking with a HD7950 + an EK waterblock, it doesn't break over 42 degrees Celsius during gaming, no reason why this card should be any different...heck, it should be cooling a lot efficiently than what I'm seeing here. Perhaps HIS should have gone with a full waterblock + a thicker rad, maybe then it would run cooler. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 10/30/2014 11:36 AM
Umm yeah there is kind of a reason why the Radeon R9 290X would be different temperature wise to the HD 7950, it's called TDP (Thermal Design Power). On paper the R9 290X should run at least 30% hotter. Are you forgetting they are both built using the same basic architecture? The R9 290X just has some 2 billion more transistors (44% more) so yeah it runs way hotter. Their card was also overclocked to the hill. But you are right $700 for this card is bonkers when you can get a decent air-cooled version for half that. |