14 DAY TRIAL // As you may or may not have come to know by now, the original equipment manufacturers that partnered with Advanced Micro Devices have begun to release Radeon R9 290X graphics cards with twice the normal memory capacity.
We've already seen the Radeon R9 290X 8 GB from Club 3D and an MSI model, so it's not surprising that Sapphire is also making its move.
Said move consists in the release of the Sapphire R9 290X 8GB Vapor-X OC video board which, as the name suggests, not only has the extra memory but works faster than usual as well.
Not too much faster, since even the best air-based coolers have limits, and so do liquid-based ones actually, but still faster than normal.
The specs of the Sapphire R9 290X 8 GB Vapor-X OC
This graphics card still uses a lone Hawaii graphics processing unit but can push it to 1,030 MHz if needed, instead of being limited to 1 GHz.
Not that leaving the clock alone would have harmed things that much. Even 1 GHz is more than enough to run any game at full quality.
The only thing that wasn't possible, or at least worthwhile, on the original model was playing a high-end game in 4K quality (3840 x 2160 pixels). And there needed to be more memory for that, nothing else.
Obviously, adding the extra 4 GB of VRAM solved that issue nicely. But like other AMD OEMs, Sapphire didn't let it end there, so it pushed the VRAM clock a bit higher too, from 5 GHz to 5.5 GHz.
All in all, the newcomer is about as good as the Club 3D one but a bit slower than the MSI one, which has a top GPU clock of 1,040 MHz.
As for the cooler, it is a Vapor-X model with three fans and the vapor chamber mounted between the GPU and the heatsink base and cooler assembly. This maximizes heat transfer.
The Tri-X structure combines five heatpipes (three 8-pin and two 6-pin) and three fans (90mm fans with aerofoil section blades) to get rid of the temperature.
Availability and pricing
The Sapphire R9 290X 8GB Vapor-X OC video board, complete with 10-phase VRM, high-endurance design, Intelligent Fan Control (IFC), Dual BIOS and four video outputs (Dual DVI-D, High speed HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2 ports) should sell soon. The price hasn't been revealed though, unfortunately. You'll have to wait for retailers to reveal it.
