Rating: 9.0.

1. Introduction 2. Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC 3. Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC (Super High Res Gallery) 4. Testing Methodology 5. Unigine Heaven Benchmark 6. Unigine Valley Benchmark 7. 3DMark Vantage 8. 3DMark 11 9. 3DMark 10. Alien V Predator (1600p) 11. Alien V Predator (Ultra HD 4K) 12. Sleeping Dogs (1600p) 13. Sleeping Dogs (Ultra HD 4K) 14. Total War: Rome 2 (1600p) 15. Total War: Rome 2 (Ultra HD 4K) 16. Dirt ShowDown (1600p) 17. Dirt ShowDown (Ultra HD 4K) 18. Tomb Raider (1600p) 19. Tomb Raider (Ultra HD 4k) 20. Metro: Last Light (1080p High) 21. Metro Last Light (Ultra HD 4k) 22. GRID 2 (1600p) 23. GRID 2 (Ultra HD 4k) 24. Splinter Cell Blacklist (1080p) 25. Splinter Cell: BlackList (Ultra HD 4k) 26. Batman Arkham Origins (Ultra HD 4k) 27. Battlefield 4 (Ultra HD 4K) 28. Thermal Dynamics 29. Acoustics Performance 30. Power Consumption 31. Overclocking 32. Closing Thoughts 33. View All Pages

In November AMD released their reference R9 290 and while we were impressed with the frame rate performance we certainly didn’t find it fun dealing with the noisy, ill performing reference cooler. It has been some time coming, but today we look at the first custom cooled, overclocked card from partner Sapphire. It features their tasty Tri X cooler.

Is this the card you need in your new system build as we head into 2014?



The Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC Edition features a custom 3 fan cooler, versions of which have appeared on other Sapphire cards we have reviewed recently, such as the award winning R9 280X Toxic Edition.



Sapphire have overclocked their R9 290 Tri-X from reference speeds of 947mhz to 1GHZ and the GDDR5 memory has also received a speed boost, from 1,250mhz to 1,300mhz. This should translate into a healthy performance boost when compared against the AMD board.

Let’s take a closer look at the card first before putting it through our tests.

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