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aevan

macrumors 601
Original poster
Feb 5, 2015
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Serbia
I read that M290X is basically a desktop HD 7870 but with lower clock speed. Notebookcheck.net says:

"The M290X in particular is similar to its desktop Radeon HD 7870 counterpart with 1280 1D shader cores and 80 texture units, but has a core clock of only 900 MHz (boost) versus the 1000 MHz clock of the HD 7870"

AMDs website confirms these specs for both cards.

However, I checked both cpu-z and gpu-z and they both display a 975Mhz clock and even a higher memory clock 1365Mhz on M290X vs 1200 on 7870.

Could it be that the M290X in the iMac is overclocked compared to the reference specs and is, in fact, equal in performance to desktop 7870?

I am asking because Witcher 3 cites HD 7870 as a minimum requirement to play, so I'm wondering if I'll be able to run it in 1080p :) As I mentioned in one post, I did not get the iMac to play games, but Witcher is something I'd love to try out.
 

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There are quite a bit of of other parts that are going on under the hood with the M290X that are not talked about.

Yes the memory bandwidth might not be as hight as some, but take a loot at the R9 285 board and you will see that it has a much improved shader engine and can actually do more with less. I was chatting with a gentleman who works for AMD and he explained that the M290 is actually quite a significant card inside with the process shader capability along with it's memory management processes
 
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