Sapphire Radeon R9 290 1)Unboxing And Overview 2) Full performance review

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R9 290 the new king of price to performance has arrived. I have been waiting for the Hawaii GPU's to be released for months. I was surprised that many retailers were sold out of the R9 290X so I picked up the 290 and some other items for my build. Lets dive right into specs and the video.

 

Code Name: Hawaii
Base Clock: 800Mhz
Boost Clock 947Mhz
Stream Processors: 2560
ROPs: 64
Texture Units: 160
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Memory SpeedL 5Ghz
Memory Bus: 512 bits
True Audio: Yes
Mantle: Yes
DirectX 11.2: Yes
MSRP:$399

 

Let me know what benchmarks you would like to see in my full review.

 

 

 

 

[EpicGeekonFire]

Nice Unboxing. Damn this card is so good for the price. Only 400 bucks...

[TheRuke]

It is amazing. Would recommend it to anyone looking for a new GPU and can't afford a 780

[D3MON]

dont like saphire because of the crappy blue pcb's....this doesm't have 1, YAY!!!!

considering most people with 780's seem to get around 85*c at 65% fan speed set those 2 as the max temp and set fan speed and run any mentioned benchmarks from here on, lets get some facts on the table instead of bias. Im sick of hearing people say "it always runs at 95 degrees" when it doesnt or "its too loud" when they've set the fan to 100%..

[Sky Daddy]

dont like saphire because of the crappy blue pcb's....this doesm't have 1, YAY!!!!

considering most people with 780's seem to get around 85*c at 65% fan speed set those 2 as the max temp and set fan speed and run any mentioned benchmarks from here on, lets get some facts on the table instead of bias. Im sick of hearing people say "it always runs at 95 degrees" when it doesnt or "its too loud" when they've set the fan to 100%..

The fact that it can run safely at 95c is actually a good thing, room for overclocking on better coolers.

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The fact that it can run safely at 95c is actually a good thing, room for overclocking on better coolers.

Just from doing some overclocking test before benchmarking. I was able to push the core to 1140 and memory to 1435. Not bad at all and the 95C helps to take the GPU to its limts and keep it there. 

[Sky Daddy]

Just from doing some overclocking test before benchmarking. I was able to push the core to 1140 and memory to 1435. Not bad at all and the 95C helps to take the GPU to its limts and keep it there. 

On the stock cooler?

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Yes on the stock cooler with 100% fan in a room that is about 22C-24C. So aftermarket coolers and water cooling will be able to smash the overclocking I got.  

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Part two of this series is up. In this video I go through benchmarks, sound / fan speed test and also LTC mining configuration. 

 

All my test where run at 1080p

[Alex780]

Nice review here!

[theking]

Hi very nice review, i bought a 290 for a really good price. Like really good price, it was on sale here and Sweden hasn't made the card more expensive. You could say i got it for 375$ if i were in the US. But of course Sweden has taxes and stuff so it costed like 475$. If Sweden had that price increase the card would cost around 700$.

And i am ok with the noise at 47%, i don't think it is as loud as everyone is saying. But i am not a silence freak, and note that i am not overclocking or mining. So take that into consideration.

 

Ps a 780 is not cheap here