The much talked about Radeon R9 290 graphics card has finally been released by AMD and it has the honor of being the second card which has featured the GCN powered Hawaii GPU core. A similar Hawaii GPU was also featured on the R9 290X which came out last month and since then has dominated the $549 market range. It has been giving quite a tough time to its competitors since it provides excellent performance within a lower price range.
Now that the R9 290 has finally been launched, it is the right time to talk about the specifications and the details which surround the much anticipated launch of the year. Equipped with 2560 Stream processors, it clearly indicates that only 40 CU’s will be enabled on this Hawaii part. Being over clocked at 947 MHz with this being the max frequency, it brings remarkable performance. This speed is adjustable with the Dual BIOS switch which allows the users to switch between the Quiet mode and the Uber mode according to the usage. On the R9 290, a GDDR5 VRAM of 4 GB runs on the 512-bit interface which generates a bandwidth of 320 GB per second at a clock speed of 5.0 GHz.
The 8+6 Pin power configuration which powers the R9 290 represents a TDP of over 250W. There is a wide diversification of the display outputs which include Dual-DVI, HDMI and Display port. Not only this, the display outputs feature the Eyefinity compatibility and will be able to run the games on 4k resolution without any issues. Talking about the comparative analysis, under the reference clocks department, the Radeon R9 290 manages to be ahead of the GeForce GTX 780 with a difference of only a few percentage points but when over clocked, it has the ability to surpass the GeForce GTX Titan as far as performance in concerned.
Performance Slides:
Source: AMD | News Archive