“You looking at me?”. The robot on front of the Sapphire R9 290X TriX OC box is nicely designed, much improved over Sapphire's previous 3D renders of (rather well endowed) women. Less sexiest for sure.
Some specifications are listed on the rear of the box, including ‘4GB of super fast 512bit GDDR5 memory'. Its 8GB, not 4GB and Sapphire are obviously just reusing the old box. Tsk.
The bundle is quite good. You get literature on the product, a case sticker, software disc (best grabbing new drivers direct from AMD's website), and a high grade 1.8 meter HDMI cable.
The (by now) familiar yellow and black cooling system which incorporates 3 big fans. The card is built around an attractive black PCB, but I was a little disappointed that Sapphire didn't fit a backplate on this model. It helps improve appearance, cooling and offer protection for the sensitive transistors and circuitry on the PCB.
AMD's high end R9 290X is a power hungry card. The reference R9 290X is fitted with a single 8 Pin and 6 Pin power connector. This Sapphire board is fitted with 2x 8 Pin connectors, possibly to help improve stability under overclocked conditions. We measure power draw later in the review.
There is no Crossfire connector on the R9 290X Tri-X Edition. The 290X and 290 offer Bridgeless Crossfire capabilities. The image above also shows that the cooling system actually slightly overhangs the length of the PCB below.
The card has a DVI-I, DVI-D, full sized HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.
R9 Series graphics cards can now support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time.
As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection. A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays.
The card disassembled, highlighting the excellent TriX cooler which features monster 10mm heatpipes. The Tri-X cooler comprises five 10mm copper heatpipes – two of which bend 180 degrees backwards from the core block into a secondary set of aluminum fins.
Release date October 2013, a sign of how old this hardware is getting now. The Hawaii CPU is built on the 28nm process and has 64 ROPS, 176 Texture units, and 2816 Stream processors. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a wide 512 bit memory interface. Sapphire have overclocked both core and memory from 1,000mhz to 1,020mhz and 1,250mhz to 1,375mhz respectively (5.5Gbps effective).