Home / Tech News / Featured Announcement / Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB Review

Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB Review

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Tomb Raider at 4k resolution and the synthetic stress test Furmark – recording both results.
power consumption
The graph above explains just how hard the Tri-X cooler has to work to maintain the temperatures we documented. We measured around 240 watts under load, which is around 80 watts more than some of the GTX980 solutions we have tested in recent months.

While most enthusiast gamers won't care about an extra 80 watts of power consumption at the socket, it is worth bearing in mind that any cooler Sapphire build for these R9 290X cards has to be extremely capable – they have to work much harder to maintain lower temperatures.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

First AMD UDNA GPUs expected in 2026

AMD's unreleased UDNA GPU architecture is back in the news, with a fresh leak suggesting …

13 comments

  1. 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.

  2. hey.. it’s there a GTX780 on top of GTX970??….

  3. hahahhaha 8GB lost to 3.5 GB.

  4. 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!

  5. The low overclocked last gen R9 290X destroyed the extremely overclocked next gen GTX 970.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Hmmm, no backplate? Got one with my 270X Trix. Seems like a pretty bad party foul.

  9. do you have a 4K setup?

  10. yup, you?

    edit:
    tested both cards with same games aswell (borrowed the 970 from a friend, can’t afford both of them :P)

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. 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!