Home / Tech News / Featured Tech Reviews / Sapphire R9 280X Vapor-X OC and R9 290 Vapor-X OC review

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

Total War ROME 2 is the eighth stand alone game in the Total War series, it is the successor to the successful Rome: Total War title. The Warscape Engine powers the visuals of the game and the new unit cameras will allow players to focus on individual soldiers on the battlefield, which in itself may contain thousands of combatants at a time.

Creative Assembly has stated that they wish to bring out the more human side of war this way, with soldiers reacting with horror as their comrades get killed around them and officers inspiring their men with heroic speeches before siege towers hit the walls of the enemy city. This will be realised using facial animations for individual units, adding a feel of horror and realism to the battles.
rome2 2014-03-18 12-09-36-73
We test at Ultra HD 4K resolutions with the ULTRA preset.
image0014

rome 2 4k
The AMD R9 295X X2 really does completely dominate this game at Ultra HD 4K – a really intense test of any graphics solution. The Sapphire R9 290 Vapor-X OC scores well, almost perfectly matched with the more expensive Sapphire R9 290X TriX OC. The R9 280X runs out of bandwidth at Ultra HD 4K, struggling to maintain playable frame rates at these high image quality settings.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Ducky One 3 Pro Nazca Line Keyboard Review

The One 3 Pro Nazca Line keyboard from Ducky feature the revamped Cherry MX2A switches

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

  18. I am definitely
    enjoying your website. You definitely have some great insight and great
    stories.
    Vaporultra.com