Important: PowerColor sent us an updated quiet BIOS for our testing, which I uploaded here.

PowerColor's R9 290X PCS+ comes with a massive triple-slot, triple-fan cooler that promises to handle the heat output of the Hawaii GPU better than the reference design. The card's PCB is identical to that of the reference board, but PowerColor has increased the clock speeds of their card a good deal. Out of the box, the GPU is overclocked by 50 MHz, and the memory comes with an additional 100 MHz. This makes the R9 290X PCS+ and ASUS DCII, which runs the same frequencies, the highest clocked R9 290Xs available today. It's nice to see that PowerColor overclock their memory out of the box, too, which is something many other pre-overclocked cards don't include. Overall, the 290X PCS+ provides a 3% performance advantage over the AMD reference design, which is not a huge increase, but every bit helps. Compared to GTX 780 Ti, the card is 5% slower, but it is 4% faster than the GTX Titan.
As mentioned before, PowerColor's big cooling solution needs three slots in your case, which might make installation difficult in some systems, although its incredibly length also contributes to that. In return, you get significantly improved cooling performance with temperatures that never go above 70°C during gaming. PowerColor uses the same dual-BIOS feature as the AMD stock card to provide a "quiet" and "performance" BIOS. Using the performance BIOS, the card is a little bit quieter than the reference R9 290X, which is still way too noisy in my opinion. Things dramatically improve with the quiet BIOS, and temperatures are still fine at 76°C. Nevertheless, the card is not as quiet as I would have expected it to be with a triple-slot cooler and "quiet" mode enabled. PowerColor should have in my opinion allowed the card to run a bit warmer in quiet mode, which is a mode users have to pick on their own as the card comes with the "performance" BIOS enabled by default, and those actively switching to the "quiet" BIOS would know that less noise normally results in higher temperatures. Compared to the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X in performance mode, the card runs cooler but is noisier, and it is quieter but a little bit warmer in quiet mode. The ASUS DirectCU II OC reaches higher temperatures in quiet mode, but is still the quietest R9 290X we have tested so far; and those cards are all dual-slot designs. To be honest, I definitely expected a bit better from a triple-slot design.
Our sample overclocked very well, better than all other R9 290Xs we tested so far. It's also good to see Hynix memory chips used since they generally overclock much higher while avoiding some of the stability issues users reported the R9 290 Series with Elpida memory to suffer. PowerColor tells us that not all retail PCS+ cards will feature Hynix memory due to current shortages of these chips. I also like the included backplate out of thick metal because it gives the card a high quality feel.
With a price of $700 in the US, the card comes at the same price as other custom design R9 290Xs, but is still fairly expensive, especially since you can find the GTX 780 Ti, which is faster and quieter, at a similar price. In Europe, the card retails for around €480, which is a good €100 cheaper than the GTX 780 Ti, so there, it could be an option if you want to save some money.