Introduction

AMD's Radeon R9 290X is built on the company's 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 MSI's flagship R9 290X Lightning today. It comes with a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler and MSI says it to be equipped with everything hardcore overclockers need to break world records. MSI overclocked GPU frequency by 80 MHz out of the box, while memory remains unchanged.

The MSI R9 290X Lightning is currently available online for $699.