Introduction

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



We are reviewing the ASUS R9 290X Direct CU II OC today. It comes with an overclock of 50 MHz on its GPU and 100 MHz on the memory and features ASUS's latest DCII heatsink, which promises to greatly improve noise and thermal performance over the reference design R9 290X.

ASUS quotes the price of their card at $599, which is just $20 higher than AMD's stock board.