KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
In November AMD released their reference R9 290 and while we were impressed with the frame rate performance we certainly didn't find it fun dealing with the noisy, ill performing reference cooler. It has been some time coming, but today we look at the first custom cooled, overclocked card from partner Sapphire. It features their tasty Tri X cooler.
Is this the card you need in your new system build as we head into 2014?
The Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC Edition features a custom 3 fan cooler, versions of which have appeared on other Sapphire cards we have reviewed recently, such as the award winning R9 280X Toxic Edition.
Sapphire have overclocked their R9 290 Tri-X from reference speeds of 947mhz to 1GHZ and the GDDR5 memory has also received a speed boost, from 1,250mhz to 1,300mhz. This should translate into a healthy performance boost when compared against the AMD board.
Let's take a closer look at the card first before putting it through our tests.
Of course the first AIB custom cooler WOULD be on a 290 non-x…my patience runs ever thinner.
Happy about the thermals. Not happy about the OC potential though. I though it could hit 1.2GHz.
No voltage tweaking? Cmon Kitguru, we wanna see more speed!
Did you increase voltage with that overclock?
Once we took the power limit to +40% (as shown in the screenshot) we didn’t find any improvements above this point. Not with this sample anyway. It can vary from card to card.
So the difference between the reference and the 100£ more toxic version is 1fps in games ? legit.
what power suply that graphic card need? (sorry for my bad englando)
The problem with the AMD cards is that they are being used for mining. Which has made the cards hard to find, and any that are for sale are at some insane jackrd up price well over the retail price. This is going to hurt AMD in the long run, as people will justto nvidia for those very reasons. AMD needs to block the mining ability, if they want to survive as a gaming card.
For reviewer:
Please, can you post a maximum VRM1 and VRM2 temperature in load from GPU-Z?
Thanks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-heZ7rzvpE – Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X unboxing and preview