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 MSI Radeon R9 290X GAMING today. It comes with an overclock of 30 MHz on its GPU. Memory clocks are unchanged. The thermal solution is MSI's famous TwinFrozr dual-fan cooler, which should help tame the R9 290X's heat output. According to MSI, the card retails at around $700, but we've seen prices much higher than that, especially on Newegg.