The Radeon R9 290 has been introduced quite a while back and thanks to Sapphire we're finally having a look at the reference model. As you might already know, the card comes with a blower type cooler and clocked at 947 MHz on the GPU and 5'000 MHz for the memory. Overall we're curious to see what kind of damage this card can do.


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Presentation

Today we're having a look at Sapphire's Radeon R9 290, which has been built according to AMDs reference design. Therefore you get the standard cooler as well as the usual PCB in combination with reference clocks. This review will also show you what the R9 290 is able to score when it comes completely reference.

As we already mentioned this is an AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics card, that's been build according to reference specifications. The GPU is therefore set to work at up to 947 MHz. A closer look at the memory reveals clocks are at 1'250 MHz (effective 5'000 MHz).

During our testing the Sapphie Radeon R9 290 constantly kept core clocks at 947 MHz. Usually, when we run Furmark, we see GPU clocks go down by quite a few MHz, but with this card that is not the case.

Specifications

	Sapphire Radeon R9 290	Radeon R9 290X	ASUS Radeon R9 290 DirectCU II OC
Chip	Hawaii Pro	Hawaii XT	Hawaii Pro
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	6.20 billion	6.20 billion	6.20 billion
GPU clock	947 MHz	up to 1'000 MHz	1'000 MHz
Memory GDDR5	4'096 MB	4'096 MB	4'096 MB
Memory clock	1'250 (5'000) MHz	1'250 (5'000) MHz	1'260 (5'400) MHz
Memory interface	512 Bit	512 Bit	512 Bit
Memory bandwidth	320 GB/s	320.0 GB/s	322.6 GB/s
Shader Cores	2'560	2'816	2'560
TMUs	160	176	160
ROPs	64	64	64
PCB Type	Reference Design	Reference Design	Custom Design
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	AMD Reference	AMD Reference	DirectCU II

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - DIRT Showdown
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Far Cry 3
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 15 - Metro: Last Light
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 16 - GTA V
Page 7 - BattleField 3	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise levels
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 10 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2	Page 20 - Conclusion