ROG MATRIX R9 290X Platinum Edition, this is the name of ASUS latest AMD based flagship graphics card. Equipped with an armada of features, equally interesting for gamers as well as overclockers, ASUS is fighting to win gamers as well as overclockers hearts with this card. Other than that there is the very latest version of ASUS' powerful and strikingly good looking DirectCU II cooler. Overall we're really curious now to find out what this thing is capable of and what new features there are.


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Presentation

Earlier this month, ASUS has officially announced two new members of its Republic of Gamers MATRIX graphics card lineup and, in addition to the ROG MATRIX GTX 780 Ti, ASUS has decided to also announce the new ROG MATRIX R9 290X Platinum Edition graphics card which we have a chance to check out in our review today.



The ASUS ROG MATRIX R9 290X is equipped with AMD's famous 28nm Hawaii GPU which features 6.2 billion transistors, 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs and 64 ROPs as well as 4GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 512-bit memory interface. As you can see from the GPU-Z screen below, ASUS has decided to keep the GPU at its reference 1050MHz but we are quite sure that it will be able to sustain that clock much better than the reference cooled version, mostly thanks to its custom cooler on top of the GPU, which we will talk about a bit later. The 4GB of GDDR5 memory also remained at reference 1350MHz (5400MHz effective).

Specifications

	ASUS Radeon R9 290X Matrix Platinum	Radeon R9 290X	Radeon R9 280X
Chip	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XT	Tahiti XT2/L
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	6.20 billion	6.20 billion	4.31 billion
GPU clock	1'050 MHz	up to 1'000 MHz	1'000 MHz
Memory GDDR5	4'096 MB	4'096 MB	3'072 MB
Memory clock	1'350 (5'400) MHz	1'250 (5'000) MHz	1'500 (6'000) MHz
Memory interface	512 Bit	512 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	345.6 GB/s	320.0 GB/s	288 GB/s
Shader Cores	2'816	2'816	2'048
TMUs	176	176	128
ROPs	64	64	32
PCB Type	Custom Design	Reference Design	Reference Design
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	DirectCU II	AMD Reference	AMD Reference

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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