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Nvidia are in an rather troubling situation right now. Their mid/high end GTX970 has been one of the biggest selling graphics cards of all time however recent hardware related concerns have caused a massive backlash, with AMD keen to capitalise on this as owners attempt to get refunds or spend a little extra for an upgrade to another card.
For many, AMD's R9 290X makes a lot of sense, especially when factoring in recent price drops. A Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X 4GB for instance is available now for £289.99 inc vat. This puts it directly head to head with some of the overclocked GTX970 cards available today. Obviously the AMD hardware demands more power and emits greater heat – but if we look past this to a pure performance analysis, the R9 290X remains competitive.
With the 8GB cards Sapphire are keen to target the audience who demand plenty of VRAM – those for instance who are buying a new Ultra HD 4K screen. Their Vapor-X OC 8GB card has recently seen a price drop from £419.99 to £389.99, and the Tri-X OC 8GB reviewed today is a little less expsensive, at £347.99 inc vat.
The Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC performs well at 1080p and 1600p, although the Nvidia GTX980 has a clear performance lead at both resolutions. When we increase the resolution to 4K the performance gap narrows considerably, and the 8GB AMD card can compete against custom overclocked GTX980 solutions.
The biggest concern right now remains constant. The R9 290X demands 80 watts more power under load than Nvidia's GTX980. While a wide audience won't care too much about a marginal electricity bill increase, the ramifications of this added power demand mean that Sapphire have to create a very substantial cooling configuration. The three fans spin quite fast when the demand is sustained although it is testament to the great cooler design that the Hawaii core peaks at only 65c when gaming.
The Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB is available from Overclockers UK for £347.99 inc vat – this is around £40 less than the Vapor-X OC 8GB version, which recently dropped in price to £389.99 inc vat.
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Pros:
- Heavy and built to high standards
- additional core headroom available.
- good looking card.
- 8GB of memory offers greater futureproofing.
Cons:
- no backplate.
- power hungry.
- cooling system has to work hard under load.
Kitguru says: Sapphire are pushing this somewhat aging technology to the limits. The R9 290X Tri-X OC 8GB is a fantastic graphics card, but we eagerly await new architecture from AMD.
I’ll always be an Nvidia fan at heart, but goddamn, this is a nice card. Good clocks, Decently low heat, and that memory makes it a top contender for 4k. Definitely impressed with how far they’ve pushed a nearly 2 year old design.
hey.. it’s there a GTX780 on top of GTX970??….
hahahhaha 8GB lost to 3.5 GB.
No Eyefinity/Surround benchmark? Shame on you kitguru. Its one of the main purposes of such a card, and you are completely missing that point. I expected much better from a site like this.
Shame on you!
The low overclocked last gen R9 290X destroyed the extremely overclocked next gen GTX 970.
Definitely pointed towards refunds from GTX 970 disgruntled users. Its obvious the 970 is lacking in 4K and what is not visible in this benchmark is the stuttering after the 3.5gb vram threshold is exceeded.
For people building 4K gaming rigs for Star Citizen and other demanding games its quite an excellent choice if purchased in pairs. Until the R9 380X release of course.
Hahahaha nvidia could only be compared to a gen from 2 years ago.
Also this card does its job by far better than the 970. Try a 4k setup and you will notice the difference with demanding games.
Hmmm, no backplate? Got one with my 270X Trix. Seems like a pretty bad party foul.
do you have a 4K setup?
yup, you?
edit:
tested both cards with same games aswell (borrowed the 970 from a friend, can’t afford both of them :P)
I tested GTX 780, GTX 970, R9 290X crossfire, GTX 770, R9 280X Crossfire. Upto 1440p damn good Nvidia beating AMD smoothly above that on 4k little struggle with GTX 970 but 780ti and 980 are faster still on 4k. Still no single GPU is able to play games with max settings on 4K above 40 fps fluently.
Bought this card before Christmas.. Biggest waste of money…
The driver software is the biggest let down with this card.. Catalyst crashes the computer and the Tri-X software is faulty. Always kept rebooting the computer.
At first I thought it was my PSU but I bought a corsair 750 and it still kept happening. Changed to the Nvidia GTX 970. installed the hardware and drivers not one single problem. I was really disappointed as I have used AMD quite a bit in the past.
Catalyst omega fixed that problem in december. IF there is problem with omega installed then you have faulty HW. 970 has issues with memory that cause stuttering in certain games and will be problem for more future games and it is not fixable by driver update as reboot problem was!