14 DAY TRIAL // Since Advanced Micro Devices has finally launched the Radeon R9 290X graphics card, its OEM partners are releasing their custom versions of it.
But “custom” is too strong a word really, when all you do is change the sticker on the fan and the theme of the box.
Then again, it's not like AMD allows anything beyond minor factory overclocking, so MSI and ASUS didn't really have a choice but to just take the reference boards and re-launch them under their own brands.
Maybe by the time Christmas rolls around, AMD will ease up on the restrictions and we'll actually see custom PCB.
Until then, the biggest “customization” we'll see is water cooling, and even instances of that will be few and far between.
ASUS does have a special treat though: the GPU Tweak program, which fine-tunes the GPU and video-memory clock speeds and voltages, as well as cooling-fan speeds and power-consumption thresholds.
Some of the MSI and ASUS video boards ship with EA/DICE's Battlefield 4 game.
