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.