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The Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X Graphics Card keeps you in the fight whatever the circumstances. It features the latest GCN (graphics core next) architecture from AMD, with 2816 stream processing units and an enhanced engine clock of up to 1010Mhz. It is equipped with 4GB of the latest high performance GDDR5 memory on a 512-bit interface and now clocked at 1250 MHz (5.0 GHz effective), delivering higher bandwidth than the reference design. The Sapphire Tri-X cooler offers a cool environment for stable GPU performance.
Pros: For gaming, the card is sweet sweet sweet. Although don't use the Sapphire OC tool if you want to push it, get the MSI Afterburner as it works, has profiles, exact fan settings, easier to use, etc etc... I'm running all games I've thrown at it at 1080p without a hitch. Ultimately will pair them against a 4k display to actually take them to their limits. Right now not breaking a sweat. This includes Metro 2033 (all of them), Crysis (all of them), heck, even STALKER Clear Sky runs well (yes, that's not a new game, but its notoriously inefficent). Mining. Do not listen to the first reviewers - this IS a 900-1000 KH/s card. However, do your research. It will NOT do those numbers out of the box. My happy point is 1040Mhz Core, 1525Mhz memory OC, using SGMiner w/ paramaters: -I 20 -g 1 -w 512 --thread-concurrency 32765. This is on a Windows 8.1 x64 OS. I hover right around 950Kh/s average, rock-stable mining for days at a time. Ultimately will try under Linux to squeeze out that golden 1MH/s number. Point of order - I use the MSI Afterburner to set the OC profiles, then set them back when I'm done mining. The SGMiner and CGMiner OC functionality is dangerous because if not shut down properly, will not revert the OC to stable levels for normal usage! I learned this the hard way, so take heed. Card runs very cool - I've pushed to 1080 Mhz Core 1525Mhz memory and it never broke 75C, hovered around 73 to 74 the whole time.
Cons: Noise. Now, don't get me wrong - when compared to stock cooling options that are more akin to turbo-jets at take-off, this thing is whisper quiet. But relative to your gaming room/office, once you ramp up those fan profiles to push the fans to 50%-60% when the card is mining, it can get pretty loud. Furthermore, as another reviewer mentioned, there IS some very obvious buzzing from the fans. Now, this ONLY happens when the fans are pushed that hard, which should never need to happen for games. The cooler is more then sufficent to tackle resource hogging games and stay under 40%, while keeping the card under 70C. However for mining, I like to overcool the card beyond what the stock cooling profile calls for, and that is when I get the buzzing. I'm not knocking an egg off for this because of two reasons. 1) The cooler works, very well, and I have protection profiles set to shut down mining and the card if the tempertures go too high - meaning if one of the fans gives out. More then likely, the cooling assembly just isn't geared to take that much vibration. It may even be possible to find the point of buzzing and sound-deaden it. Which brings me to point 2: 2) Since its only loud when its mining, and since its only mining when I'm not around to use my PC for other reasons - I never actually have to experience or deal with the noise.
Overall Review: Got two of these. I'm a gamer first, miner second. Bought one at a time (of course price dropped $20 right after I purchased the second one... oh well - I mined $20 worth of coins in the time it took for the price to drop so I guess its a wash). Am very happy with purchase.