Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC Review

The box artwork highlights a mean looking futuristic combat robot with ‘Vapor-X' branding adorning his battle armor.

Inside are a couple of power converter cables, alongside an HDMI cable and driver disc. This card qualifies for the ‘Radeon Gold reward‘ entitling the owner to 3 free games.

The Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC is kitted out with a formidable cooling system – comprising three fans running the full length of the PCB. The three 90mm fans use Aerofoil section blades to enhance air flow and reduce noise. They use dust repelling ball bearings. The rear of the card is fitted with a backplate to enhance cooling performance.

You will notice an ‘on/off’ switch. Sapphire has added a new feature to this card which Sapphire are calling ‘Intelligent Fan Control (IFC)’. With this feature enabled only one of the three fans (center) will spin with lower loads. When the GPU temperature rises then all three fans will kick in. In theory this should reduce noise emissions under most situations. Gamers and overclockers can turn this off, so the three fans spin all the time.

It takes power from two 8 pin power connectors, as shown above. The card also features a Sapphire branded button which offers UEFI support. The AMD R9 290 and 290X both offer bridgeless Crossfire support – meaning there is no need to hunt out a Crossfire connector.

A single link, and dual link DVI connector are present, alongside a full sized HDMI (1.4a) and DisplayPort (1.2) connector. Eyefinity is fully supported and no active adapter is required.

This is a very impressive looking cooler. The R9 290X Vapor-X card uses Digital Power Control and a new Aero10 VRM section to deliver 10 phase power with high power Direct-FET technology to the GPU, memory and control circuitry. The power design on this card uses Sapphire Black Diamond chokes – featuring a black ferrite cooler for better efficiency. Sapphire are using high grade electrolyte capacitors throughout the design.

If you have been paying attention you may have seen the white strip running along the top of the card, close to the two 8 pin power connectors. Sapphire’s engineering team have left one of the copper layers exposed. An additional heatsink mounted direct to the copper layer means that heat can be absorbed into the PCB from the GPU, then transferred out. Sapphire claim a reduction in overall temperature by ‘several degrees’.

The Tri-X cooler is mounted on top, utilising a monster 10mm heatpipe, with two 8mm pipes and two 6mm pipes spreading across the full length of the PCB.

The Sapphire R9 290X Vapor-X OC is overclocked to 1,080mhz. It has 64 ROPS, 176 Texture units and 2,816 unifed shaders. The 4GB of SKHynix memory is connected via a 512 bit memory interface. The memory is overclocked to 1,410mhz (5.64Gbps effective).

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