Tom’s literally called it the “Titan killer”. Yes the reference cooler ran hot and sounded like a hair dryer, but the price to performance was amazing. And the AIB cards had some great models, like the Sapphire Toxic.
I feel it still deserves a spot on the list. Also the heat issues were mostly addressed with Sapphire’s coolers for example. Just seems highly critical to write it off, at least to me.
Nowhere, like it should be. The launch was a disaster because AMD pushed the clock/power targets extremely high in order to “compete” with the 780 and 780 Ti, with the end result being a jet engine in terms of noise.
It wasn’t until February before MSI and ASUS released better cooled cards, at which point the damage from reviews and lack of holiday sales had accumulated.
In the 7970’s case, AMD had at least the benefit of being 3 months early compared to Nvidia.
What are you on about, nvidia had to lower price on 780 twice and issue an emergency SKU in form of 780Ti to be able to compete on price/performance with Hawaii. R9 290 (non-X) was a steal at its price considering how long it managed to stay relevant in the years ahead. GCN driver improvement also added a significant chunk of performance (9k GS in FS at release and around 15k with OC and driver improvements 3 years later). Also, Kepler blower cards were also loud, so the point is sort of not a point at all
Where’s R9 290X?
Yeah…This list is a joke without the 290X.
The 290X wasn’t even close to being as competitive as the also-omitted 4870
The 290X wasn’t that impressive at launch. Ran hot and wasn’t cheap enough to be a good value.
What are you talking about man it was on par if not faster than the first Titan…
Tom’s literally called it the “Titan killer”. Yes the reference cooler ran hot and sounded like a hair dryer, but the price to performance was amazing. And the AIB cards had some great models, like the Sapphire Toxic.
I feel it still deserves a spot on the list. Also the heat issues were mostly addressed with Sapphire’s coolers for example. Just seems highly critical to write it off, at least to me.
it was faster than the 780 and literally $250 less than the MSRP of the 780 and the 780ti wouldn’t come out for quite a while
Nowhere, like it should be. The launch was a disaster because AMD pushed the clock/power targets extremely high in order to “compete” with the 780 and 780 Ti, with the end result being a jet engine in terms of noise.
It wasn’t until February before MSI and ASUS released better cooled cards, at which point the damage from reviews and lack of holiday sales had accumulated.
In the 7970’s case, AMD had at least the benefit of being 3 months early compared to Nvidia.
What are you on about, nvidia had to lower price on 780 twice and issue an emergency SKU in form of 780Ti to be able to compete on price/performance with Hawaii. R9 290 (non-X) was a steal at its price considering how long it managed to stay relevant in the years ahead. GCN driver improvement also added a significant chunk of performance (9k GS in FS at release and around 15k with OC and driver improvements 3 years later). Also, Kepler blower cards were also loud, so the point is sort of not a point at all
How would you have known that the 290 would perform better in 2016?
As for the price cuts, I remember the 780 Ti launch, and the 780 launch was effectively a cut from the Titan.
The 780 price cut was the reason for the jet engine cooler on the 290-series in the first place.