XFX R9 290 Double Dissipation, (R9-290A-EDFD)

Testing & Methodology

For game testing we turn off the boost portion of the processor and force it to one speed, in this case 4.375 GHz. I could give the entire spiel about longevity and overclocking but most of you on the outer edge of the overclocking envelope already know you are killing your processor. We can’t afford a degrading processor and still report reliable results, so we use a conservative 4.375GHz. We are in the process of changing up how game settings are reported so bear with us on that.

We make three passes at the game from a save previously created, as soon as that point is loaded we trigger a macro that runs the same route and performs the same actions each time. Benchmarks that run automatically are ran just like that. We run each scenario three times and average the three. That score is reported here. If an anomalous score should develop, one so far out-of-bounds that it is questionable, we run one more run and throw out the anomalous score.

Test Rig