Introduction

AMD's Radeon R9 290 has been on the market since the end of last year, and it has positioned itself successfully as a cost-efficient option if you are looking for high-end gaming performance without breaking the bank.

Compared to its big brother, the R9 290X, the R9 290 features 2,560 of the 2,816 stream processors physically present on the "Hawaii" silicon, which is only a 9% reduction. The TMU count is down to 160 from 176, and the reference-design GPU's core clock speed is 948 MHz instead of 1000 MHz.



Sapphire's R9 290 Vapor-X comes as the company's latest installment of a custom-designed take on the R9 290. The Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X uses a large triple-slot, triple-fan cooler that has been combined with Sapphire's Vapor-Chamber technology to keep the card cool. A little switch lets you disable two of the three fans in idle, which reduces noise levels without increasing temperatures much.

Clock speeds have been increased to 1030 MHz on the GPU. Memory is overclocked to 1400 MHz.

Retailing at $440, the cards is a good deal more expensive than other R9 290 cards that can be had for as low as $370 thanks to recent price drops.