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Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC Review (1600p, Ultra HD 4K)


Our review today features a selection of hardware tested in the last 10 days with the latest 331.82 Forceware and 13.11 beta Catalyst Drivers.
in system
We are using one of our brand new test rigs supplied by PCSPECIALIST and built to our specifications. If you want to read more about this, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page.
DSC00656

We are featuring results today with an Apple 30 inch Cinema HD Display at 2560×1600 resolution and an Asus PQ321QE Ultra HD 4K screen running at 4K 3840 x 2160 resolution.

Room ambient was held at 23c throughout testing.

Comparison cards:
AMD R9 290X (1000mhz core / 1,250mhz memory)
AMD R9 290
(947mhz core / 1,250mhz memory)
Palit JetStream GTX780 Ti OC
(980mhz core / 1,750mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX780 Ti
(876mhz core / 1,750mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX Titan
(837mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX780 (863mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
MSI GTX780 Lightning (980mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Edition (1,150mhz core / 1,600mhz memory)
Palit GTX770 OC (1046mhz core / 1753mhz memory)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Rome 2
Dirt Showdown
Tomb Raider
Metro Last Light
GRID 2
Splinter Cell Blacklist
Batman Arkham Origins
Battlefield 4

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Special thanks to James Brett for his robot, used in the graphs in this review.

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15 comments

  1. Of course the first AIB custom cooler WOULD be on a 290 non-x…my patience runs ever thinner.

  2. Happy about the thermals. Not happy about the OC potential though. I though it could hit 1.2GHz.

  3. No voltage tweaking? Cmon Kitguru, we wanna see more speed!

  4. Did you increase voltage with that overclock?

  5. 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.

  6. So the difference between the reference and the 100£ more toxic version is 1fps in games ? legit.

  7. what power suply that graphic card need? (sorry for my bad englando)

  8. 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.

  9. For reviewer:
    Please, can you post a maximum VRM1 and VRM2 temperature in load from GPU-Z?
    Thanks.

  10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-heZ7rzvpE – Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X unboxing and preview

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