Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat card, no coil whine and runs very cool.
Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 2015
Great card, way better than the XFX version I bought in the initial launch.
I bought this to use as my main card as I have high coil whine with my XFX and I wanted to be able to run a few high teir games at 1440p-144Hz and utilize my freesync range(Word of note, the pool of recent AAA games that run at 144Hz is very small if it exists at all).
Pros:
The card is small... Very small.
It looks pretty good, the Sapphire card comes with decal stickers on it, but if you peel that off, it's quite weird to feel the textured cover.
The watercooling loop keeps the card very cool, max temps I saw are around 35C but it's winter(XFX was around 48C in the summer).
Heat generation is ridiculously low, having run two R9 290 in CF, I was expecting the usual space heater effect, but I can barely keep my room warm in this California winter cold.
The fan is a gentle typhoon, pushes a LOT of air while making next to no air turbulence or fan noise, but see cons.
Cons:
There's no version without the water cooler but it could be worse, could be no version without a squirrel cage blower.
The fan made a scraping noise every time it turned on, and randomly through usage so I replaced it with my XFX fan which was perfect(later replaced with a matching static pressure case fan which I wouldn't recommend).
Small Cons that don't affect me:
No Analog display output, I'm sure you can get an active adapter, and I definitely don't need one in the age of HDMI but still a con.
No HDMI 2.0, but the DP to HDMI2.0 dongle is pending(?) and driver support has been written so we shall see.
Witcher 3 - A special case, but might hint towards future NV GameWorks titles:
Witcher 3 doesn't like Crossfire, regardless of what card you're using. With one card, I can max it out at 1440p and see 50+ fps all the time and rarely have problems. When it comes to Crossfire, I see 0% scaling, fps capping to 24 randomly, cards sitting around 750-800MHz 50% GPU usage, animations running too fast, just the worst stuff.
The good news is that with Crimson, you can set a game specific overdrive so I set my single card to run at a bit higher clock and disabled crossfire and it is pretty much perfect, just a shame because I would have liked to see if crossfire could give me the performance boost to run Hairworks without noticeable performance loss. Just extra flair so no real loss.
Other:
Hard to tell if coil whine is just chance or if they've made improvements to their build, looking at the PCB the chokes on both my cards are from the same lot, quite weird.
Pump noise is a thing, anyone who has ever built a watercooled system knows this, but I was quite surprised that this pump had near no whine, and was miles quieter than the XFX one I had, and I almost don't feel the need to replace the stock pump/cooler to splice the card into my current loop.
4GB VRAM is a lot but not relatively since 980Ti has 6GB and 390X has 8GB, but I haven't seen many games that require more than that other than recent Assassins Creed games(AC Unity used 2.3GB of vram at 720p low settings just because it allocated a buffer on startup).
These cards pull a lot of power, and can be very picky about input. I had a faulty dual 8pin cable powering my XFX that I had previously used to power a single R9 290 VaporX with no issues and it caused quite a few problems including black screen at low/idle power draw. After removing the cable and switching to single 8pin the issues went away and lately switched back to a different dual 8pin and it works perfectly fine. Just something to keep in mind that if there are issues with the card it's not always the card's fault(YMMV kind of thing?).
Recent drivers have added DX9 frame pacing, and since I spent a lot of time modding skyrim, it's nice to see a big improvement when using crossfire in such an old game(I went from 35-44FPS on a broken shadows modded version to around 55-103FPS, way better than expected).
Also a plus from the recent drivers, watching 1080p and 1440p 30FPS videos the card pretty much idles(300-304MHz), and CPU usage has also gone down. 1080p60FPS shows a slight bump in both CPU usage and GPU usage but it's a lot better than the 600MHz the card would run at before the update. 4K video usage is roughly around 350MHz which is also pretty surprising but CPU wise the usage is pretty intense(chrome shows two cores running full force).
Overall:
This card is great, I am playing games at 1440p and easily hitting the 60FPS+ mark in everything I am playing with few games having to be turned from ultra to high.
I bought a second one for CF not because I needed it, but because I wanted it, time will tell if this was a good idea or not, but I'm not too worried.
Sorry for the potato picture quality.
