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Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC and R9 290 Vapor-X OC review

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset.

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Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

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heaven1080pheaven 1600p
We use the settings shown above at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.
unigine heaven 1080p

heaven 2014-04-11 13-46-08-78heaven 2014-04-14 09-18-36-51

unigine heaven 1600p

heaven 2014-04-11 13-59-48-85heaven 2014-04-14 09-24-53-31
We can see there is no discernible differences between the Sapphire R9 290X TriX OC and the Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X OC at either resolution.

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18 comments

  1. You say at the bottom of the introduction page: “The Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X ships with a core clock speed of 1,030mhz and the GDDR4 memory is clocked at 1,400mhz (5.6Gbps effective), connected by a 512 bit memory interface.”

    Is the “GDDR4” memory type a typo?

  2. Yes, its GDDR5 – fixed. thanks!

  3. for god sake, I just bought a triX yesterday – I have the worst timing ever. 🙁

  4. I like the blue appearance. the cooler is spectular – never seen a company expose copper like that to cool the PCB. very clever.

  5. the price seems quite good considering, I thought it would be around £400 inc vat.

  6. Preordered the 290 Vapor-X thanks !

  7. The looks of the Vapor-X cooling is stunning! The 290 will definately be in my new build. Does anyone know the lenght of the 290 Vapor-X card?

  8. Hi Ralf, I just measured it – the cooler overhangs the PCB a little, so its around 300mm – long card.

  9. When is it coming out?

  10. Is that card faster than gtx 780?

  11. Zardon tell me pls how much additional voltage mV was added for the overclocking of r9 290 vapor-x to 1205 in this review?

  12. How did you set up your fans in you cas so you could keep the card the coolest possible? I’m thinking of buying one but I’m not sure what’s the best way to set my fans for it.

  13. Could you give the full dimensions (lengthxwidthxheight)? Mini ITX builds can be a pain fitting everything!

  14. Hey Zardon, I just got my R9 290 Vapor X and there’s this black goo between the backplate and the PCB, do you know what it is? Also can you make an overclocking guide for this GPU?

  15. If you’ll show SLI up in the list there, have the decency to show Crossfire results too. And where’s 770 in the lists ? 280x is not competing with the lot in the list there. Price or performance wise.

  16. Its nothing to do with ‘decency’. Believe it or not sometimes we don’t get access to all the cards we want to test and include them all every time we post a graphics card review.

  17. I’m actually surprised by the 1920×1080 results just ran my Powercolor PCS+OC R9 290 through the same test Ultra preset AA 4x and Tesselation off my results were as follows (were any of your settings different?):
    Min:33.5 FPS
    Avg:81.2 FPS
    Max:143.5 FPS
    Max Temp(Via GPU-Z) 71C

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