
PowerColor R9 290X OC 4 GB Review
Packaging & Contents »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.
Radeon R9 280X | GeForce GTX 770 | HD 7970 GHz Ed. | GeForce GTX 680 | GeForce GTX 780 | Radeon R9 290X | PowerColor R9 290X OC | Radeon HD 7990 | GeForce GTX Titan | GeForce GTX 690 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Shader Units | 2048 | 1536 | 2048 | 1536 | 2304 | 2816 | 2816 | 2x 2048 | 2688 | 2x 1536 |
ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 64 | 64 | 2x 32 | 48 | 2x 32 |
Graphics Processor | Tahiti | GK104 | Tahiti | GK104 | GK110 | Hawaii | Hawaii | 2x Tahiti | GK110 | 2x GK104 |
Transistors | 4310M | 3500M | 4310M | 3500M | 7100M | 6200M | 6200M | 2x 4310M | 7100M | 2x 3500M |
Memory Size | 3072 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 4096 MB | 4096 MB | 2x 3072 MB | 6144 MB | 2x 2048 MB |
Memory Bus Width | 384 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 512 bit | 512 bit | 2x 384 bit | 384 bit | 2x 256 bit |
Core Clock | 1000 MHz | 1046 MHz+ | 1050 MHz | 1006 MHz+ | 863 MHz+ | 1000 MHz | 1030 MHz | 1000 MHz | 837 MHz+ | 915 MHz+ |
Memory Clock | 1500 MHz | 1753 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1250 MHz | 1250 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1502 MHz |
Price | $300 | $385 | $335 | $390 | $625 | $550 | $550 | $800 | $1000 | $1000 |