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| 8 Out of 10 |  |
by techPowerUp!With a price of $700 in the US, the card comes at the same price as other custom design R9 290Xs, but is still fairly expensive, especially since you can find the GTX 780 Ti, which is faster and quieter, at a similar price.
by techPowerUp!It comes with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler and MSI says it to be equipped with everything hardcore overclockers need to break world records.
GPUBoss Review Our evaluation of the Radeon R9 290X among Desktop GPUs
Gaming | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 21 more | |
Graphics | |
| | |
| T-Rex, Manhattan, Cloud Gate Factor, Sky Diver Factor and 1 more | |
Computing | |
| | |
| Face Detection, Ocean Surface Simulation and 3 more | |
Performance per Watt | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 32 more | |
Value | |
| | |
| Battlefield 3, Battlefield 4, Bioshock Infinite and 32 more | |
Noise and Power | |
| | |
| TDP, Idle Power Consumption, Load Power Consumption and 2 more | |
| 8 | Overall Score |
| | |
Benchmarks Real world tests of the Radeon R9 290X
Bitcoin mining Data courtesy CompuBench
Face detection Data courtesy CompuBench
Ocean surface simulation Data courtesy CompuBench
Fire Strike Factor Data courtesy FutureMark
Sky Diver Factor Data courtesy FutureMark
Cloud Gate Factor Data courtesy FutureMark
Thief
Battlefield 4
Reviews Word on the street for the Radeon R9 290X
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|---|---|---|
What People Are Saying Give it to me straight
Performance
by techPowerUp!AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's Hawaii GPU, the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months).
by techPowerUp!AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's new Hawaii GPU, the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months).
by techPowerUp!AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's new Hawaii GPU, which is the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months).
Applications
by techPowerUp!Gaming noise levels are greatly improved over the reference design and result in very enjoyable acoustics similar to those produced by the GTX 780 or Titan.
by techPowerUp!If you look at our selection of games, you can see that depending on the game, either NVIDIA or AMD have the upper hand.
by techPowerUp!During gaming, the card is also much quieter than the very noisy AMD reference design, but the card is still too noisy.
Gaming
by techPowerUp!Overall, temperatures are very good, especially during gaming, where the card is also pretty quiet.
by techPowerUp!MSI's Gaming series usually comes with amazing noise levels, but this isn't the case with the 290X Gaming.
by techPowerUp!I would describe gaming noise as acceptable, but still clearly audible, far from the quiet experience we've seen on some custom designs from other manufacturers.
Memory
by techPowerUp!The main GPU heatsink also cools four memory chips near the GPU.
by techPowerUp!Elpida memory holds back memory OC.
by techPowerUp!Memory overclocks are also higher than on cards that use Elpida memory, wince Sapphire's card uses Hynix chips.
Power
by techPowerUp!Furmark maximum power is high, but that is also a positive as it shows that MSI has increased the card's power limit to use of the extra power delivery capability and stronger VRM to best effect.
by techPowerUp!Furmark maximum power is well below the 375 W that the PCIe power input configuration is specified for, but I saw short sub-second spikes above 400 W right as Furmark was started.
by techPowerUp!The card sips a lot of power with something as simple as decoding a video, a task comparable NVIDIA cards can handle with just 20 W. Only our Furmark maximum power draw tests show no increase, which suggests that Sapphire has configured their card's power limit to a similar value as the reference design.
Specifications Full list of technical specs
gpu
| GPU brand | AMD |
|---|---|
| GPU name | Hawaii |
| Market | Desktop |
| Clock speed | 1,000 MHz |
| Turbo clock speed | 1,000 MHz |
| Is dual GPU | No |
| Reference card | None |
raw performance
| Shading units | 2,816 |
|---|---|
| Texture mapping units | 176 |
| Render output processors | 64 |
| Compute units | 44 |
| Pixel rate | 64 GPixel/s |
| Texture rate | 176 GTexel/s |
| Floating-point performance | 5,632 GFLOPS |
memory
| Memory clock speed | 1,250 MHz |
|---|---|
| Effective memory clock speed | 5,000 MHz |
| Memory bus | 512 bit |
| Memory | 4,096 MB |
| Memory type | GDDR5 |
| Memory bandwidth | 320 GB/s |
noise and power
| TDP | 300W |
|---|
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Competitors
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 780
|
 | AMD Radeon R9 290
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 770
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 970
|
 | AMD Radeon R9 390
|
 | Nvidia GeForce GTX 980
|
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