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“You looking at me?”. The robot on front of the Sapphire R9 290X TriX OC box is nicely designed, much improved over Sapphire's previous 3D renders of (rather well endowed) women. Less sexiest for sure.
Some specifications are listed on the rear of the box, including ‘4GB of super fast 512bit GDDR5 memory'. Its 8GB, not 4GB and Sapphire are obviously just reusing the old box. Tsk.
The bundle is quite good. You get literature on the product, a case sticker, software disc (best grabbing new drivers direct from AMD's website), and a high grade 1.8 meter HDMI cable.
The (by now) familiar yellow and black cooling system which incorporates 3 big fans. The card is built around an attractive black PCB, but I was a little disappointed that Sapphire didn't fit a backplate on this model. It helps improve appearance, cooling and offer protection for the sensitive transistors and circuitry on the PCB.
AMD's high end R9 290X is a power hungry card. The reference R9 290X is fitted with a single 8 Pin and 6 Pin power connector. This Sapphire board is fitted with 2x 8 Pin connectors, possibly to help improve stability under overclocked conditions. We measure power draw later in the review.
There is no Crossfire connector on the R9 290X Tri-X Edition. The 290X and 290 offer Bridgeless Crossfire capabilities. The image above also shows that the cooling system actually slightly overhangs the length of the PCB below.
The card has a DVI-I, DVI-D, full sized HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.
R9 Series graphics cards can now support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time.
As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection. A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays.
The card disassembled, highlighting the excellent TriX cooler which features monster 10mm heatpipes. The Tri-X cooler comprises five 10mm copper heatpipes – two of which bend 180 degrees backwards from the core block into a secondary set of aluminum fins.
Release date October 2013, a sign of how old this hardware is getting now. The Hawaii CPU is built on the 28nm process and has 64 ROPS, 176 Texture units, and 2816 Stream processors. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a wide 512 bit memory interface. Sapphire have overclocked both core and memory from 1,000mhz to 1,020mhz and 1,250mhz to 1,375mhz respectively (5.5Gbps effective).
I’ll always be an Nvidia fan at heart, but goddamn, this is a nice card. Good clocks, Decently low heat, and that memory makes it a top contender for 4k. Definitely impressed with how far they’ve pushed a nearly 2 year old design.
hey.. it’s there a GTX780 on top of GTX970??….
hahahhaha 8GB lost to 3.5 GB.
No Eyefinity/Surround benchmark? Shame on you kitguru. Its one of the main purposes of such a card, and you are completely missing that point. I expected much better from a site like this.
Shame on you!
The low overclocked last gen R9 290X destroyed the extremely overclocked next gen GTX 970.
Definitely pointed towards refunds from GTX 970 disgruntled users. Its obvious the 970 is lacking in 4K and what is not visible in this benchmark is the stuttering after the 3.5gb vram threshold is exceeded.
For people building 4K gaming rigs for Star Citizen and other demanding games its quite an excellent choice if purchased in pairs. Until the R9 380X release of course.
Hahahaha nvidia could only be compared to a gen from 2 years ago.
Also this card does its job by far better than the 970. Try a 4k setup and you will notice the difference with demanding games.
Hmmm, no backplate? Got one with my 270X Trix. Seems like a pretty bad party foul.
do you have a 4K setup?
yup, you?
edit:
tested both cards with same games aswell (borrowed the 970 from a friend, can’t afford both of them :P)
I tested GTX 780, GTX 970, R9 290X crossfire, GTX 770, R9 280X Crossfire. Upto 1440p damn good Nvidia beating AMD smoothly above that on 4k little struggle with GTX 970 but 780ti and 980 are faster still on 4k. Still no single GPU is able to play games with max settings on 4K above 40 fps fluently.
Bought this card before Christmas.. Biggest waste of money…
The driver software is the biggest let down with this card.. Catalyst crashes the computer and the Tri-X software is faulty. Always kept rebooting the computer.
At first I thought it was my PSU but I bought a corsair 750 and it still kept happening. Changed to the Nvidia GTX 970. installed the hardware and drivers not one single problem. I was really disappointed as I have used AMD quite a bit in the past.
Catalyst omega fixed that problem in december. IF there is problem with omega installed then you have faulty HW. 970 has issues with memory that cause stuttering in certain games and will be problem for more future games and it is not fixable by driver update as reboot problem was!