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.



Today, we are reviewing the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC, one of the most popular non-reference R9 290X cards on the market. The TriX-OC comes with increased clock speeds of 1040 MHz on the GPU (+40 MHz) and 1300 MHz on its memory (+50 MHz).

Sapphire's R9 290X Tri-X OC card currently retails for around $700, which (at current market prices) is an insane $120 markup over the already inflated price of the R9 290X.