Manufacturer: AMD Price: $ 550 US Author: Steven Walton Date: 10/23/2013

[ Introduction ]

Today the time has finally come for AMD to unleash their highly touted flagship Radeon R9 290X. After announcing the next generation Volcanic Islands GPUs last month at their GPU14 Tech Day event in Hawaii the card everyone focused on was the R9 290X as it’s the only truly new GPU in the series... Some 8 months ago now Nvidia blew us all away with their insanely powerful GeForce GTX Titan, a single GPU solution that crammed 7080 million transistors into a 561mm2 die. The end result was a graphics card that had a texture fill rate of 187.5GT/s and a bandwidth of 288.4GB/s. The only thing holding the GTX Titan back was the absurd $1000 price tag, though having said that this didn’t stop cards from flying off the shelves. Nvidia followed up 3 months later with the equally impressive GeForce GTX 780, which made its debut at a more affordable $650, where it remains to this day. Although neither of these cards had much of an impact on AMD’s sales, as their most expensive graphics card at the time was a $450 Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, the 7990 arrived a few months later and the GTX 770 and GTX 760 which followed did. Despite beating Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 680 to the punch with their Radeon HD 7970 by almost 3 months, they found themselves unable to compete with Nvidia’s flagship once the GTX Titan arrived. Fast forward and 2 weeks ago we finally got to see AMD’s new Rx 200 series for the first time, and disappointed we were. For whatever reason AMD felt it wise to kick start their new series with a run of re-badged products, such as the R7 260X (Radeon HD 7790 overclocked), R9 270X (Radeon HD 7870 overclocked) and R9 280X (Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition underclocked). Needless to say we were less than impressed. While you can easily argue that Nvidia did the same with their GeForce GTX 770 (re-badged GTX 680 with much faster memory) and GTX 760 (OEM GTX 660 re-badged), these products followed the highly impressive GTX 780 and GTX Titan which were new parts. Moreover the GTX 770 was not only faster than the GTX 680, but it also came with $100 knocked off the price. The light at the end of the tunnel however was the Radeon R9 290X, codenamed “Hawaii XT”, which was set to be the first new product in the Rx 200 series. The R9 290X can be considered AMD’s Titan, as it takes the Tahiti architecture and blows it up adding almost 2000 million more transistors. It's the most complex and powerful GPU AMD has created and by no coincidence, it's also one of the company's most expensive single-GPU product to date matching the Radeon HD 7970 with an MSRP of $550. Before you click away, that's "only" $550, which is substantially cheaper than Nvidia's solution. So what makes the Radeon R9 290X worthy of taking on the GeForce GTX 780 and GTX Titan graphics cards? Well let’s check out the specifications to find out...

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Radeon R9 290X in Detail Testing Methodology Benchmarks: Battlefield 3, Crysis 3 Benchmarks: DiRT 3, Far Cry 3 Benchmarks: Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs Benchmarks: Medal of Honor, Hitman Benchmarks: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil 6 Benchmarks: BioShock Infinite, Metro Last Light Overclocking Performance Power Consumption & Temperatures Conclusion Next Page ->

ProX	Posted on: 10/24/2013 05:27 AM Hot damn that's amazing. About time AMD did something worth noticing.

CptChaos

Posted on: 10/24/2013 09:43 PM Top stuff. I have a GTX 780 so here is to hoping I can get another one a bit cheaper Thanks AMD!