14 DAY TRIAL // At some point later this month (November 2013), AMD's OEMs will finally be allowed to do whatever they want to the Radeon R9 290 graphics card, but until then, the reference design will be honored, and HIS did just that.
The company has introduced the Radeon R9 290 Fan graphics card, which really only has the different name going for it.
Everything else is identical to the standard spec sheet, and we'll see a lot more of this before the day is out.
The R9 290 features the Hawaii graphics processing unit (GPU), with its 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors (GCN SPs) and clock of 948 MHz.
For those who want even deeper specs, the chip is a 28nm die with 1 MB cache, a surface of 432 square mm, and 6.2 billion transistors inside.
The memory interface is of 512 bits, leading to a bandwidth of 320 GB/s thanks to the presence of 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at 5 GHz.
What's more, the Radeon R9 290 Fan benefits from support for DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3 and the new Mantle APIs (application programming interfaces).
The rest is the same: 160 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 64 ROPs (raster operating units).
The HIS Radeon R9 290 Fan has a TDP (thermal design power) of 250W, but should manage to work on less, save in those instances where a game or multitasking really is pushing the system to its limits.
As for the price, the same awe-inspiring sum of $399.99 / €399.99 is expected from all those seeking to own the newcomer. Previously, it was assumed that the price would be of $450 / €450, and even that sum was considered very low for something that matches the $499 / €499 GeForce GTX 780 from NVIDIA.
AMD is really bulldozing the graphics card market here. It wants to increase its market share, and it definitely will with this release.