Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X review at Anandtech

[Mr Alpha]

Linky

This is the first review of a custom cooled R9 290 I've seen and Sapphire really hits this one out of the park.

To spoil the ending: The card has a slight overclock with boost clocks at 1000MHz, which it can stay at in every benchmark without ever throttling. Load temps in Crysis 3: stock 94C, tri-x 70C. Now, that is an improvement. The load noise follows the same pattern: stock 57.2dB, tri-x 41.1dB.

Now slap and OC on it and the card is trading blows with the 780Ti, and still 11.6dB quieter than stock 290.

This takes the 290 out from the good value but obnoxiously loud card category and into the Whoa that's a good deal category.

 

[ivanlabrie]

Amazing!

Very good news, hope AMD can keep up with the demand.

 

[Kemosabe89]

Regardless of what people say. AMD is going the be top dog regardless of what NV puts out. Unless they compete with there pricing there no way they will be profitable with just the 1%ers being able to afford the top. I thing who cares if t
NV has the top gpu, i cant justify the premiun to go green when i cant afford the top gpu anyways. Ill call my self a fanboy becaust i dont need or afford a $600+ card. A 400-450 ur darn right but Nv just cant compete with that, for now, or maybe ever.

If maxwell does show a huge preformance increase and in the same price then sure. I hold to iasues with aany company as long as I, the general public, can afford the best preformance for the cash i work hard for. But then again AMD will have something ready to drop also.

 

[SF101]

nv will want 1000$ for first gen maxwells anyhow . prob be a full year after until you see affordable maxwell products.

 

[Burdman27911]

This is what I've been looking forward to. Now we just need the silly prices to drop back down to normal.

 

[Humanoid1]

and very nice it is too.

I kinda hope someone bothers to make a really good blower style cooler though.
Still not a fan of dumping all that heat inside my case to push my CPU temps higher than I like while folding@home...

 

[Ivy]

The OC 290X pwned the 780TI in Metro... that was epic. The cooling was always the culprit of the 290X, thats nothing new and im glad there is better solutions available now (without custom mods and water cooling). The performance... its clearly visible that there is nothing to fear for the 290X, it can tackle even the strongest Nvidias cards, so they both are more or less equal.

 

[iLoki]

The OC 290X pwned the 780TI in Metro... that was epic. The cooling was always the culprit of the 290X, thats nothing new and im glad there is better solutions available now (without custom mods and water cooling). The performance... its clearly visible that there is nothing to fear for the 290X, it can tackle even the strongest Nvidias cards, so they both are more or less equal.

Absolutely. There's just one problem with your statement. This card isn't a 290X, its just a 290!

 

[SF101]

^^^has a point