The new flagship

In case you missed all the earlier coverage and rumors, AMD's new Radeon R9 290X is based on a new 28nm Hawaii GPU, which features 2816 stream processors, 176 texture memory units, 64 ROPs and a 512-bit memory interface paired up with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. Since it is not a refreshed or rebranded GPU, it comes with a support for both AMD's new Mantle API as well as the AMD TrueAudio features.

According to reviews published earlier this morning, the new Radeon R9 290X is definitely a good graphics card with quite impressive performance but nto without any flaws. Its main advantage is the US $549.99 price tag that puts it smack in between the Nvidia's GTX 770 priced at US $399 and the Geforce GTX 780 still set at US $649. It is obvious that AMD wanted to launch a price/performance beast which is capable of reaching GTX Titan performance in some games and on common resolutions and totaly outperform the GTX 780, which is more expensive, in most games.

As noted earlier, the Radeon R9 290X is not without flaws and that high performance resulted in a rather loud and power hungry graphics card. While the cooler situation could have been corrected with a better cooler, something that AMD should have taken out of Nvidia's book and GTX Titan/780 launch, high power consumption is a direct result of high performance. The good side of the story is that it will give AMD's AIB partners a lot of room in the design of custom versions with much more efficient VRM and much better/quieter cooler.

The dual BIOS gimmick that allows you to switch the Radeon R9 290X between the Quiet and Uber modes, is exactly just a gimmick. According to our sources it gives you up to 2-3 percent performance gain (if any at all) while it raises the max fan RPM by 10 percent. In the Quiet mode, the new R9 290X is usually described as mediocre, as it compromises between heat and noise which allows it to heat up as far as 95 degrees Celsius.

Another big surprise is the Crossfire performance which comes as a direct result of switching the inter-GPU communication to the PCI-Express bus, rather than dedicated Crossfire connector. The scaling is much better, latency is better and multi-GPU fram pacing is much better.

Nvidia is definitely not sitting with its hands crossed as it already teased the GTX 780 Ti which should be faster than the R9 290X. The biggest problem for Nvidia is AMD's R9 290X launch price which is definitely the biggest surprise. As things stand now, Nvidia will be forced to drop the GTX 780 price down to R9 290X levels and position the new GTX 780 Ti in a place where it will be able to earn money (aka be affordable) but still be higher than R9 290X. Of course, if it actually ends up significantly faster than the R9 290X. Of course, AMD still has to officially launch the R9 290 graphics card with Hawaii Pro chip, that should be cheaper and, hopefully, not much slower than the R9 290X.

While the USA price is set at US $549 for the standard R9 290X and US $579 for the Battlefield 4 Edition, European retailers/e-tailers are using an opportunity to score more money from pre-orders so some are listing the R9 290X for as high as €700.

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