Introduction

Radeon R9 290X Market Segment Analysis HD 7970

GHz Ed. GeForce

GTX 680 GeForce

GTX 780 Radeon

R9 290 Radeon

R9 290X ASUS R9

290X DC II OC Radeon

HD 7990 GeForce

GTX Titan GeForce

GTX 780 Ti GeForce

GTX 690 Shader Units 2048 1536 2304 2560 2816 2816 2x 2048 2688 2880 2x 1536 ROPs 32 32 48 64 64 64 2x 32 48 48 2x 32 Graphics Processor Tahiti GK104 GK110 Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii 2x Tahiti GK110 GK110 2x GK104 Transistors 4310M 3500M 7100M 6200M 6200M 6200M 2x 4310M 7100M 7100M 2x 3500M Memory Size 3072 MB 2048 MB 3072 MB 4096 MB 4096 MB 4096 MB 2x 3072 MB 6144 MB 3072 MB 2x 2048 MB Memory Bus Width 384 bit 256 bit 384 bit 512 bit 512 bit 512 bit 2x 384 bit 384 bit 384 bit 2x 256 bit Core Clock 1050 MHz 1006 MHz+ 863 MHz+ 947 MHz 1000 MHz 1050 MHz 1000 MHz 837 MHz+ 876 MHz+ 915 MHz+ Memory Clock 1500 MHz 1502 MHz 1502 MHz 1250 MHz 1250 MHz 1350 MHz 1500 MHz 1502 MHz 1750 MHz 1502 MHz Price $470 $400 $480 $500 $580 $599 $900 $1000 $680 $1000

AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's new Hawaii GPU, the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months). Using 6.8 billion transistors, the GPU is built on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC, Taiwan. It features 2816 shaders and 64 ROPs, connected to 4 GB of memory using a 512-bit wide memory bus.We are reviewing the ASUS R9 290X Direct CU II OC today. It comes with an overclock of 50 MHz on its GPU and 100 MHz on the memory and features ASUS's latest DCII heatsink, which promises to greatly improve noise and thermal performance over the reference design R9 290X.ASUS quotes the price of their card at $599, which is just $20 higher than AMD's stock board.