I am looking to upgrade to either 290 or 290x. Currently i am thinking about either MSI or Sapphire but i am not sure what i should go for 290 or 290x, please advise on what i should get.
Also which brand do you guys recommend MSI, sapphire or Asus?
I have 3 of the MSI R9-290x, and I am extremely satisfied with them. They've given me no issues what so ever, and I can't confirm the memory. I haven't had a chance to put water-blocks on them. I've had no driver or graphic issues...
Personally, I would wait if I were you. Right now, only reference cards are out, and non-reference cards are coming into the market. The main reason why I am saying you should wait is because there could be a revision coming out. If you've seen the article from Hardware360, they indicated that Hawaii isn't a "full Hawaii." This means that the Hawaii GPU isn't using it's full set of Streaming Processors. The count of Streaming Processors is still 2816 active or open on the GPU, but Hawaii actually has 3072 streaming processors. So you're only using 90% of the Streaming Processors on the R9-290x. That's a difference of 10%. This could also translate to an increase in FPS performance by a good 10 to 20%.
The reasoning behind this, holding those core back, was so Hawaii wouldn't exceed the 95 degree C temperature. You have additional Streaming Processors or Cuda Cores, you get additional increases in temperature when those Cores do work. So one can come to the conclusion that AMD knew they had crappy, air-cooled fans on the R9-290x and 290. Plus, they didn't have any fan-solutions at the time to deal with the additional 10% cores on the Hawaii GPU.
I suspect, AMD could release a revision like the 7970 GHZ Edition for the R9-290x. We'll probably see something before or after a Dual GPU solution. It depends on how AMD want to milk it's consumer base. Right now, it's perfectly fine with the situation. Even though NVidia's GTX 780 Ti is only performing 2% to 20% better in the FPS area, R9-290 and R9-290x consumption is going up because of the current base, but you also have to look at the bit-mining consumers. They want AMD Graphic Cards because there is more Streaming Processors. More SP equate to more ALUs at higher core frequencies that do redundant processing. Therefore, they have a higher first derivative on the hash rate. A 10% increase in SP on the Hawaii GPU could equate to a 10% increase on that hash rate, without overclocking.