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 PowerColor R9 290X PCS+ today. It comes with a powerful triple-slot, triple-fan cooler. It also includes a 50 MHz overclock on the GPU and a 100 MHz overclock on memory, which makes it the highest clocked custom design R9 290X you can buy at this time (together with the ASUS R9 290X DC2 that runs the same clocks).

Price-wise, PowerColor expects the card to cost around $700, which is inline with other custom cards on the market at this time.