Radeon R9 290X 

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).

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).

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).

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.

If you look at our selection of games, you can see that depending on the game, either NVIDIA or AMD have the upper hand.

During gaming, the card is also much quieter than the very noisy AMD reference design, but the card is still too noisy.

Overall, temperatures are very good, especially during gaming, where the card is also pretty quiet.

MSI's Gaming series usually comes with amazing noise levels, but this isn't the case with the 290X Gaming.

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.

The main GPU heatsink also cools four memory chips near the GPU.

Elpida memory holds back memory OC.

Memory overclocks are also higher than on cards that use Elpida memory, wince Sapphire's card uses Hynix chips.

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.

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.

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.