9/4/2023 0 Comments Clone x ocAt the same time Sapphire has also given the 290 Tri-X OC a mild factory overclock to boost its out of the box performance and differentiate it from the reference 290 and competing customized 290s. Sapphire has taken AMD’s reference design and replaced AMD’s reference blower with their recently introduced Tri-X open air cooler, which as we’ll see significantly changes the cooling/performance equilibrium compared to the reference 290. The first customized 290 series card in our hands, Sapphire’s Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC is a rather straightforward semi-custom card. The first such card we’ll be looking at is Sapphire’s first customized card, the Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC. There are already a handful of models on the shelves now with a number more to arrive over the next few weeks, and over the coming weeks we’ll be taking a look at several of those models. Or with respect to the 290 in particular, customization offers partners a chance to go back and try to improve on the reference 290’s weakness, its noisy cooler.Įver since the 290 review there has been a lot of chatter and questions about when we’d see the first customized cards show up, and the answer is that customized cards are finally here. Customization allows the board partners to differentiate from each other by designing cards around different capabilities – be it size, cooling, or overclocking – in the process creating a wide spectrum of cards for a wide spectrum of use cases. ![]() While the reference cards set the bar for performance and (for better or worse) drive the overall perception of the series, the modern board partner system means that in time we can look forward to partners eventually releasing semi-custom and fully-custom cards, which use custom coolers and custom boards respectively. With that said, we have known since that first day that the stories of the 290 and 290X weren’t yet complete. Ultimately this meant that for buyers concerned about noise the options available were either to take a performance reduction or pay quite a bit more for a GTX 780. The end result was that while the reference 290 was fast it was also obnoxiously loud, especially in comparison to the high-end cards of the last few years. AMD’s reference cooler already struggled to keep the 290X without generating excessive noise, and for the 290 AMD needed to turn up the fan speed even further in order to ensure the 290’s average performance was very close to its maximum performance. On the other hand AMD had to make significant sacrifices elsewhere to get there. This made 290 a very potent card for gamers still looking for a value at the high-end. ![]() AMD decided they wanted to take on the $500 GeForce GTX 780 and win, and they did just that by delivering performance better than the GTX 780 for just $400. On the one hand the amount of performance offered for the price was unequaled. When we first took a look at AMD’s Radeon R9 290 back in November, what we found was a card that was on the whole a mixed bag.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |