14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire may or may not have wanted to sit on this secret until it was time to properly wow the worldwide tech industry, but it won't get to shock anyone now because its upcoming video board has been leaked.
You might be confused as to why the leak of a video adapter could be such a dramatic event, knowing how many such leaks occurred in the past and will doubtlessly occur in the future.
The reason is pretty straightforward really: the graphics card that Sapphire has prepared is pretty much the best AMD single-chip card there is.
It might even be the best single-chip card, period, because it has a lot of memory. Not 3 GB, not 4 GB, not even 6 GB.
Instead, the adapter, called Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X, will have no fewer than 8 GB GDDR5 VRAM, something only previously achieved (barely) by professional/workstation cards (AMD FirePro, NVIDIA Quadro).
That's twice as much as what was included on the reference R9 290X and more than even on dual-GPU boards from both AMD and NVIDIA.
Clearly, Sapphire wants to make a statement here, that it intends to enable the smoothest high-resolution, multi-monitor gaming ever.
That said, to make sure that the heat produced by so many memory chips doesn't get out of hand, Sapphire has outfitted the Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X with the Tri-X OC cooler.
It's a black and sky blue triple-fan array with a dual-slot heatsink, as the photos from Videocardz show us (that's where the leak sprung up). So we suppose it's possible it will take three slots (heatsink+shroud).
Unfortunately, we don't know the clocks of the Hawaii graphics processing unit (GPU with 2816 Stream processors, 176 TMUs, 64 ROPs and a 512-bit bus interface for the memory). They will probably be of over 1 GHz (the non-reference PCB has stronger circuitry that would handle the extra punch).
On that note, user-initiated overclocking should be easier as well, although, as always, if you bust your card while putting it through the wringer, the warranty won't cover it.
The Radeon R9 290X VAPOR-X, with its huge backplate and four video outputs (Dual-DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort) will probably have a price of $799 / €799. In any case, it won't be anywhere close to the standard $549 / €549 when it shows up (whenever that is).
We're not sure how well this card will sell even if the price does stay below $799 / €799. The cooler doesn't look all that exquisite, and the display output configuration could have been a bit more extensive.
