SAPPHIRE TRI-X OC 100362-2SR Radeon R9 290 4GB 512-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 Video Card

Pros: *Waves hand in front of your face.* - "This is the R9 290 you're looking for." No seriously, this is it. - Fantastic performance. - Great cooling solution. - Lots of overclocking headroom. - Cool and quiet at both idle and load. - Mantle support. - True Audio support. This Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC card is a beast and makes short work of any games you throw at it, if you couple this thing with other good hardware, it's going to deliver a top tier gaming experience. I can sit here and throw benchmarks at you, but I don't see the need, just hit Google and you will find that this card gets great reviews and performs wonderfully. Even more so when overclocked. I am a gamer, not a miner, but even with the premium price at the time of this review, I can honestly say this card is still well worth the money if your shopping the AMD side of the fence. It easily satisfies that sweet spot in price to performance vs it's big brother, the 290X. This is exactly what the R9 290 series needed.

Cons: None as of yet. This is a long card, make sure it will fit in your case before buying.

Overall Review: This card was purchased to replace my tried and true Radeon 7970 that has been chugging away in my main gaming system since it's release. I play a lot of high end games, such as Battlefield 4, Skyrim, Crysis 3, and others. I have games such as Thief, Titanfall, and Star Citizen on pre-order. I wanted a card that can handle these games, at or near their maximum settings, at 1080P with relative ease. While the 7970 can come very close, this R9 290 delivers a noticeable jump in performance. It's support for Mantle and True Audio were also both selling points since they are both technologies I am interested in. At the time of this review, with only one supporting Mantle title, a demo/benchmark, and no True Audio games, I can only touch on Mantle's performance in the one game that supports it so far, Battlefield 4. Unlike some people, the game has always ran great for me, even on my 7970. However on this R9 290, it runs even better, under both Mantle and DX. On average Mantle seems to gain about 10 or so FPS vs DX, not bad for a beta stage product in my humble opinion. Even under full gaming load, this card does not go much past 70C, and it stays quiet. I can't hear it over the other sounds of my CM HAF 932. Even with an overclock of 1250MHz Core and 5.8GHz VRAM, temps barely hit 80C. At these clocks you get a noticeable boost in performance and the card seems to have no trouble maintaining good thermals and acoustics, lightyears better than the reference models. There really are not enough good things I can say about this card, the Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC is a fantastic investment in this gamers opinion. If you're looking for the best 290 series at the best price point, look no further. Basic System Information: ASUS Sabretooth 990FX R2.0 Gen 3 AMD FX-3850 Vishera Eight-Core 4.5GHz OC Thermaltake Frio CPU Cooler Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC 4GB Seagate 600 Series 240GB SSD (Boot/OS) 16GB A-Data 1866 DDR3 Corsair HX850W Professional PSU Cooler Master HAF 932 Case Windows 7 Ultimate 64

Pros: Some of these reviews are so bad they actually compelled me to write a review myself. Here's a real list of Pros/Cons so please read thoroughly! 1. Coolest Temps on R9 290 I've come across, read this as it "Dumps heat into your case very well" 2. Very stable under extreme loads, for very long times. 3. ATI Drivers are NOT an issue, they work perfectly, every time. 4. Very quiet compared to reference design. I run three R9 290s in one rig, side by side, however the middle card is a reference 290 due to the spacing issue with these cards. (Please see Cons)

Cons: 1. Takes up 3 slots, despite appearing as if it would only take up two. The issue is that the screws on the back, would stop the fans on a card butted up against it. But with a reference card, this is not a problem, so keep in mind that you cannot put two of these cards against each other. It maybe part of the reason these cards get such good temps. 2. Power Hungry. (Like all 290 cards) This is where people get mad and blame drivers for black screens because their 860Watt Antec power supply, that works fine with their old card, just can't keep up with this new card. What they don't realize is that 860 watts on 2 rails is only 430 watts on each rail, and when one rail has way more wattage being used than the other, it's unstable power. If you pair these cards with a GOOD PSU, you WILL NOT HAVE A PROBLEM. 3. Dumps heat like no body's business. Since the card does not push the heat out the back of the case like the reference card, you may want to flip some fans around to avoid heat getting trapped in air pockets. This happens when the cards are "Rebreathing" the same hot air over and over, and thus creates a heat cycle. I've found having all fans push fresh air at them, forces air out the back, and to the front of the case. And exhaust fan on the top and back is required. For 3 R9 290s I have an 1100 Watt PSU and 5 case fans, and that just gets the job done.

Overall Review: This card is a blast, it's fast, stable, quiet, and as long as you feed it right and give it a good home it will be very well behaved. Starve it for power with an outdated or cheap PSU, or leave it sweltering in a box with poor airflow, or just wrong airflow, and you will not be a happy buyer. Here is a link to the best PSU's for this Videocard on Newegg http://j.mp/newegg-best-psu

Pros: This card has some of the best out of the box performance you can currently buy and with minimal effort you can coax even more performance out of it through overclocking. I bought this card to push BF4 to the limits and it did just that (Ultra settings @ 1080p, 125% superscaling.) It runs extremely cool, even with a modest overclock (average ~76C in my system.) At the moment, in any game out there you can safely set the video options to maximum and sit back and enjoy.

Cons: The $100 premium over ATI's MSRP due to the current situation with crypto-currencty mining.

Overall Review: Even with the current LiteCoin craze causing a +$100 premium, this card is still a great value in comparison to it's contemporaries (Nvidia's 780.) If you're looking for a top of the line card right now, this is it. The Hawaii based GPUs have the best performance at 4K as well right now, due to a focus on pixel fillrates. My system's main components are: Core i5 2500k @ 4.4ghz 8 gigs DDR3-1600 ram Sapphire Tri-X R9 290 Through testing in the first few days of ownership, I've got the clock rate up to ~1100 and the memory up to ~1365 mhz. The card has been stable except for a few DirectX errors crashes in BF4 when pushed beyond these values. I've yet to determine if I've hit a hard limit on either core/memory. This is a rather modest overclock, and some of the figures out there suggest some chips have a much higher limit, such as the guy in the other review stating he hit 1200 core/1600 memory. It's possible I just received a dud. Even with that possibility, this thing is amazing. After the overclock I average 80-90fps in BF4 with the aforementioned settings in the Pros section. Stock out of the box it was more like 60-70 fps. My previous set up consisted of dual Radeon 6870s. This generated a ton of FPS, but did not have the memory to generate higher levels of detail. The quality difference with the 290 is amazing. If you're looking to spend about $500-600 on a video card right now, this is the card to get.

Pros: This card has great cooling, temperatures are easily kept under 70C, even in a case with little airflow. It can max out nearly every game in 1440p, and can hold a solid 60FPS in BF3 Ultra, 1440p. This card overclocks quite well too, I did some rough testing and managed to clock my 290 Tri-X faster than a stock GTX 780 Ti, I'm quite impressed with this card.

Cons: Currently, this card is extremely overpriced on Newegg and similar sites. I managed to find one for $460, and purchased it. The only other issue I have with the card is that the fan rattles around the 40% range, but other than that I'm quite pleased.

Overall Review: If the price on these cards come down, I would definitely recommend it to others to purchase, but right now the price is a little high on Newegg. Other than that though, I really love this card.

Pros: Fast, Cool design

Cons: AMD Catalyst Control Center not the best with cooling the card with no custom fan curve. Downloaded MSI Afterbuner to make custom fun curves.

Overall Review: PRICE!!! bought this yesterday for $750 and today it's $620...... My friends get it a couple weeks ago for $550. come on newegg i come to you for good prices.

Pros: Fast, stays cool, excellent 4K desktop performance, app performance (Lightroom, Vegas and Office) and decent 4K performance in games (you may have to dial back some of the quality settings - but then who needs AA at 4K?). Surprisingly low noise levels too and stays cool even under high load.

Cons: Overpriced at this point Also needs a 8-pin and a 6-pin PCI-E power connector, make sure your power supply can handle an additional 225 - 250 Watts load!

Pros: The pros on this card are very simple. 1) FANS- the fan noise is a huge upgrade over other cards, even those that are not 290s. I use these for mining so the fan noise is fairly important. I run them at 85% and they are surprisingly quiet for a 290 card. 2) FAST- i have these running top notch with no problems 3) COOL- 78 degrees clocked out and ready to roll.

Cons: The only Con is the cost gouging going on in the market. This is fairly understandable right now though since AMD know their cards are two full markets now. Gamers and Miners.

Pros: + Obviously Fast Card. I run a 1440p monitor on ultra settings and it breezes through Wildstar (newest game I'm currently playing) + Excellent future since more people are going past 1080p and the 4GB memory on the card really shines + Under Max load card gets to 75 degrees C. My case does NOT have good airflow being in a corner + After various read reviews, the price per performance is unmatched in this catergory

Cons: + With 3 fans the card is long. Not necessarily a Con for me since I have a full tower with ample room but if you are concerned measure before you buy!

Overall Review: I was hesitant buying an AMD card since I have always been an NVIDIA guy. However, after all the positive reviews I decided to pull the trigger and I couldn't be happier. You will here NVIDIA fan boys (or people who are afraid of change) scream AMD is worthless, that the cards run hot and are slow. However, I feel with the R9 AMD really stepped up it's game and provided the basis for companies such as Sapphire to tweak the card until it's unbeatable. If there is one thing you take away about this card it is the Performance vs the Price is unbeatable for this tier of card.