Reviews - Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X

[HEXUS]

At long last, a custom-cooled Radeon R9 290-series graphics card.

Read more.

[cptwhite_uk]

Hooray! Great card, great cooler, realistic price.

[MrJim]

At last! Very cool in both senses of the word

For anyone who's interested, there's a review of the Asus Direct CU II R9 290x over at PC Perspective:

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Graphic...cs-Card-Review

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Have Powercolor and Sapphire hired the same graphics card stylist??

[kalniel]

Somewhat cynical to call your card a 290 tri-X so that buyers confuse it with a 290X. Don't like that kind of marketing.

[scaryjim]

Somewhat cynical to call your card a 290 tri-X so that buyers confuse it with a 290X. Don't like that kind of marketing.

OTOH, performance is close to a 290X while it costs a reasonable amount less, so not that surprising.

It's hardly a shock that the memory won't clock very high - that's the sacrifice AMD made to fit in a 512bit bandwidth: smaller slower member controllers. With such a wide interface the memory doesn't *need* to clock fast.

So, roll on more custom cooled Hawaii cards - things are about to get interesting

[abychristy]

This card is great okay really great and guys who have a problem with the design - you are not putting it around your neck or something, its gonna be inside a PC!

[the.elles.d]

I've never understood comments on internal components design. Who cares about it?
I'd take more power or lower price tag over design any time!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I don't have an issue with the design,but more the point that the Sapphire and Powercolor cards look similar,even down to the unique colour scheme.

Edit!!

Ignore me on this! It seems the coolers are not the same colour. Oops!!

[ColinP]

Possibly a little misleading to say that the temps have reduced by 20%, since the celsius scale arbitralily starts at the freezing point of water. If you measure the baseline as being the ambient temperature in your test environment (e.g. 20C), then the temps have been reduced by nearly 30% from the reference solution.

[kalniel]

Possibly a little misleading to say that the temps have reduced by 20%, since the celsius scale arbitralily starts at the freezing point of water.

You're right. To be clear it should be from absolute zero, so only a 6% reduction.

[ChinesePate]

where's bf4?

[minicale]

I love the look of that card but I just realised the power usage is higher on the 290 then the 290x how come?

[kalniel]

I love the look of that card but I just realised the power usage is higher on the 290 then the 290x how come?

Three reasons - 1) the 290 chips are binned for lesser quality - quality being the voltage required to work at a given frequency. The good chips end up as 290X chips. 2) higher frequencies for the same voltage draw more power. 3) Sapphire have probably bumped the voltage a bit to make sure the OC is stable.

[kevinf]

Asus DCII is better IMO.

[kompukare]

Asus DCII is better IMO.

You mean the Asus Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC @ £499 (OcUK) vs this Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X @ £380?

Well, at over 30% more expensive it should be better...

Just noticed that OcUK actually list the Gigabyte Radeon R9 290X OC WindForce as being in 10+ stock. In fact that's the only AIB custom R9 290/290X showing in stock. No reviews yet. Don't really trust Gigabyte GPUs after the component switching they did with their 7950's though.