Sapphire's Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X delivers substantial improvements over the AMD reference design. The Vapor-X comes overclocked out of the box, with a large OC on both GPU and memory, which nets the card some extra performance. Our testing has the Vapor-X match the R9 290X in performance. It even beats the GTX Titan by a few percent and is 5%-6% faster than the R9 290 reference design. NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 780 Ti is 11% faster, though, but also much more expensive. This makes the Sapphire Vapor-X an excellent choice for large-monitor gaming at 1440p or 1600p, beyond 1080p.
Sapphire's Tri-X triple-slot cooler keeps the card cool thanks to its vapor chamber baseplate and the five heatpipes attached to it. With the R9 290 Vapor-X, Sapphire is also introducing a feature that lets you switch between all three or one fan in idle. I found the feature to help with noise in idle, but not by a huge amount. Personally, I like my rig to be quiet while I work, so I'd use the single-fan mode option all the time. The temperature increase with one fan engaged in idle is only significant if you constantly monitor and watch temperatures; it won't affect anything else. No matter whether you opt for single- or triple-fan mode, during gaming, all three fans will be active all the time. Compared to the noisy R9 290 reference design, Sapphire has greatly improved noise levels, but look at the noise levels competing NVIDIA cards offer and the Vapor-X is nothing special. I would describe gaming noise as acceptable, but still clearly audible, far from the quiet experience we've seen on some custom designs from other manufacturers. Nevertheless, if you only shop for AMD card, the Vapor-X is definitely one of the quieter cards on the market. The card's triple-slot cooler should fit into most cases despite its length of 30 cm. It's nice to see a backplate included, too, which not only looks nice, but also helps a bit with temperatures due to the metal strips Sapphire added to their PCB. These strips certainly contribute a bit to cooling, but are not a revolutionary feature that makes a night-and-day difference. Still, great to see some innovation.
Sapphire has completely revamped their card's PCB design, which seems to affect power consumption quite significantly. In our testing, we see a power consumption increase of roughly 20% in all states, including non-gaming ones. With 90 W for the card alone during media playback, especially Blu-ray power consumption is horrible – a deal breaker for a compact media PC with limited cooling capability. Yet a typical card-only power consumption figure of 240 W vs. 290 W doesn't really matter all that much to most gamers using a full-sized case.
Overclocking of our sample worked reasonably well and yielded overclocks comparable to other R9 290X cards we have tested. I'm happy to report that my review sample uses Hynix memory chips since they supposedly cause less problems than those by Elpida, and Elpida's chips also don't overclock as well. The R9 290 Vapor-X's memory overclock was still a bit lower than what I expected given its Hynix chips.
You can find Sapphire's Radeon R9 290 Vapor-X in stock at most major retailers, priced at around $440. Recent price drops have positioned the cheaper R9 290 variants at $370, which brings its price premium to $70, and that's a lot. Even with all the improvements taken into account, the card wouldn't be worth a 20% price premium to me. Even the GTX 780 at $470 could be an option if power and noise really matter to you and you can live with slightly worse performance.