Well that escalated quickly...
It's the same price as some of the 780 Ti's.
The pricing is terrible. D:
This pretty much sums up the reason though.
Welcome to Canada . land of where we get bent over when it comes to buying electronics , paying sometimes as much as 50% + more on certain products. Best exemple is with headphones but it's true for video cards and in general. And don't even think about importing , the custom fees are ridiculous even though sometimes it can be worth it.
But anyway i''m going way OT here so i'll just stop but i'll end this with saying that NCIX normally has some of the best pricing in the country for PC components. And if it's higher than the competition they price match. Great customer service too , one of the best in Canada. Overall they are much better than Newegg , Tigerdirect and the rest of PC retailers here in Canuckland. That said , yeah that MSI Custom 290x is pricy as hell though. Was expecting something along 629$ or somewhere in that range. At 700$ i'm not sure it's worth it over a 780ti at that price point..
$700 isn't bad, I just paid $150 for "Little einsteins pat pat rocket with 8 figurines, lights & music"...
That was like 4 of my LTC /\
It is when the msrp is 550. For non ref, aftermarket is what 40 more tops!
But it is a nature of the bussines. Not hating on them.
Depends on the card, but typically standard Twin Frozr cards don't even cost you that. They are sometimes cheaper than reference designs.
I don't know what the solution is. AMD can try to up production of chips, but what happens if the market crashes? Do they even have the allocation at TSMC to make more? The safest thing to do is nothing and just take the sales. They could definitely make more money if they had more cards, though.
I hope the difficulty stays low for a just a little while longer.
Going to unload 3x reference launch edition 7970 GEs, 2x new-in-box 7870s and 2x 5830s - already have a couple of MSI Twin Frozr 780s on the way from newEgg
Hopefully those 7970s fetch a pretty penny as I'm assuming that they're voltage unlocked (very early batch and never tried OCing myself).
So their using a reference PCB? well that's a bit dissapointing.
Backplate looks nice, vram cooling looks inadequate/non existent.
It's only a 290. I would assume they'd want to keep the premium stuff for the 290X. It's not like the reference PCB is a weak one. I actually like the idea of being able to get a reference board with improved cooling, standard.
Ahh, didn't know it was the 290. I should read better.
The 8+6 pin gave it away instantly.
It's way under-provisioned for the card.
The VRM is directly connected to the heatsink. It's much better than the DC-II's VRM cooling.
EDIT: ah you mean VRAM cooling. The IMC is flaky above 1400 mhz anyways, with some doing well to 1500 mhz. I doubt the VRAM will run very hot given those conditions.
I believe Hynix GDDR5 runs at 1.5v@1500mhz. I believe Elpida GDDR5 runs at 1.6v but I haven't seen anyone be able to actually run Elpida at 1500 mhz on the 290/290x yet so it doesn't matter much anyways.
Just because the 8+6+pci-e is rated at 300W doesn't mean that's all it can draw. I agree with you on the RAM cooling. I'm pretty sure if it needed cooling they would have provided it.
NO VRM1 heatsinks, reference PCB.. meh.
http://videocardz.com/48482/msi-shows-radeon-r9-290x-gaming-twin-frozr-4s-oc
Looks like it has decent VRM cooling, unlike the DCU-II shown earlier.
NO VRM1 heatsinks, reference PCB.. meh.
A heatsink on the VRM1 is the most crucial thing for R290s to crank in extra vcore for OC. If you give it a great cooler but crap VRM cooling, all it does is limit its potential. AMD's reference PCB has just enough mosfets to keep the core fed, its not like prior gens where they went overboard.. so they do run hot already at stock.