Introduction

AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's new Hawaii GPU, which is the first truly new high-end graphics chip from the company in a very long time (21 months). The GPU is built on a 28 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan and uses 6.8 billion transistors. It features 2816 shaders and 64 ROPs, connected to 4 GB of memory using a 512-bit wide memory bus.



Today, we are reviewing the PowerColor R9 290X OC, the AMD reference design card overclocked from 1000 MHz to 1030 MHz. All physical components of the card remain the same, but PowerColor put their sticker on the fan hub. PowerColor does not charge a price premium for their card, so it retails at $549.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• PCIe power cable

The Card

AMD is using their typical reference design cooler, which has been upgraded with some red highlights. PowerColor's contribution to the design of the card is the sticker on the fan hub. Dimensions of the card are 27.5 x 11 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor surround gaming is possible with one card.

Please note that the DVI outputs no longer support analog monitors. AMD also improved their display controller hardware, so you can now use three HDMI/DVI monitors at the same time without having to buy an active DP-to-DVI adapter (this was a requirement to providing the TMDS clock signal for the third monitor on previous generation cards).

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


The Radeon R9 290X only supports CrossFire via the PCI-Express bus, which means that CF bridges are no longer required. According to AMD, this will not affect performance and actually enables 4K CrossFire. You may combine up to four R9 290X cards in a multi-GPU CrossFire configuration.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.