Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB Review

To overclock today we are using the latest version of MSI's Afterburner based on the excellent Rivatuner.


We managed to squeeze another 11.9% from the core before the system would hardlock. There was a little headroom available on the memory (75mhz), but it makes little, if any difference to the frame rate performance, so we left it alone. Sapphire are already pushing the GDDR5 memory rather high on this card so it is best focusing on core tweaks.


The tweaked core speeds helped improve the performance significantly. In 3DMark11 for instance, the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB was closely matched against the MSI GTX970 Gaming 4G. After pushing the core speed to 1,142mhz the final score was higher than the reference clocked GTX980. It is well worth taking the time to push the Hawaii core as far as possible.

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