I have an reference XFX 290 en route I picked up for $260 shipped. I just hope the cooler isn't too noisy.
It's not the quietest cooler but at the same time it's not as bad as people state. If you crank it up really high it does get noisy. If your just going to be gaming with it you should be OK....Unless your really anal about noise or the fans burnt out from mining.
Seems like sapphire is universally accepted as the best of the lot. The vapor-x would go nicely with my case/color combo. The yellow on the tri-x is :|.
I think the XFX looks the best of the lot.
Having 1 of each I think both your statements are spot on.
I'd avoid XFX. Nice looking cooler, but has VRM temp issues and i'd give them another few rounds of cards to prove themselves after their disaster on the 7970 series.
People need to get over XFX's 79xx coolers. The R9 2xx series DD coolers are in line with everyone else's. They are fine and give you a lifetime warranty unlike everyone else who has 3 years or fewer.
I won't argue that the DD's vrm cooling is inferior to the ref or TriX design at all.
I used a custom fan profile for both of these cards for my experiment.
The fan profile on the TriX doesn't need to be that aggressive to keep the vrm temps low. I think the TriX fan pretty much hovered around the 46-48% mark.
The DD has great core temps out of the box even with the stock fan profile. It's weakness is it's inferior vrm cooling I guess. The custom fan profile I used during the testing pretty much tied the fan speed % to the core temp....For clarification 30%/30c ----100%/100c which it never got to. The only reasoning for the aggressive fan curve was to keep the vrm temps down as the fan speed is tied to the cores temp. The cooler is pretty dang quiet even when cranked up to 100%.
I was playing around today with both my rigs in the picture. My DD rig currently has no games installed so was stuck with Valley benchmark to compare temps.
I fired up valley benchmark on both rigs and let it loop for 45 minutes before I clicked the benchmark runs. I only did three benchmark runs on both cards but figured the cards would be warmed up enough before.
I decided to run the DD at the same clocks as the TriX just to see what would happen.
End results:
Max VRM 1 temps
TriX 68c
DD 82c
Conclusion the TriX vrm temps are great....The DD gets a bad wrap but isn't as bad as some say....Core temps
Too be a fare comparison I really should have taken my rigs into the garage and blown out the dust from both cards. If I remember correctly the TriX was blown out last, the DD looks to have tighter fins and both are a little dusty currently....Added to my to do list.
The vrm temps on the DD did seem to improve with use. Maybe the design needs a good burn in....Mining seemed like the best option to me at the time and made me some $'s also.
XFX failure rate? I haven't seen any mention of this for the 290's.
I mined 24/7 with my XFX DD 290 from the day it was delivered 1/28/14 - 3/27/14 without any issues....Other than windows update rebooting the rig a couple of times on me. The mining load is pretty intense so I kind of call it the ultimate burn in test.
After mining, selling my old 7870, 1 ref XFX 290 for a tiny profit, I'm only into the pair of 290's for $417. Would have been way less if shopblt didn't take so long to get the TriX in stock.
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