It's been previewed and sent out to retail for a price of $800 / €800 or so

Mar 4, 2014 08:04 GMT  ·  By

Micro-Star International hasn't released the latest high-end, AMD-based graphics card, exactly, but the Radeon R9 290X Lightning has been previewed in full, and we can expect retailers to add it to their order lists this week.

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning may very well become the strongest video board powered by the Hawaii graphics processing unit (GPU) from Advanced Micro Devices.

Micro-Star International definitely didn't cut any corners when it made the printed circuit board (PCB), designing it with a 12+3+2 phase power design.

Not only does it take two full 8-pin PCI Express power connectors to power it, but the board also has a third port, of 6 pins, for extra juice.

And to think that there are fairly decent video boards (albeit all from the low end of the add-in market) that manage to work on just the energy of the PCI Express slot, with no extra PSU inputs required.

Clearly, MSI is gunning for prestige here. There are few enough people who actually buy top-tier video boards, around 1% of the total maybe. If MSI's Lightning accounts for even 10% of those, the company will have made a fair bit of cash and earned some brownie points in the process.

After all, the Radeon R9 290X Lightning has a price of around $800 / €800. Multiply that by, say, 500 or a thousand and you make quite a pretty penny.

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning uses the Hawaii XT GPU, with 2,816 Stream processors, 176 TMUs (texture mapping units), and 64 Render back-ends, or ROPs as they are otherwise known (raster operating units).

It also has a 512-bit memory bus, which drives the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM installed on the adapter. We aren't sure what the clocks are, exactly, but the GPU will surely be of over 1 GHz (the upper limit of the reference board from AMD).

Furthermore, MSI implemented the new Triple force architecture, with 3 basic features. One is Triple Level Signals, consisting of on-board LEDs that show real-time load in three colors: green for light, blue for mid, and red for heavy.

The second element is Pure Digital PWM control (precise voltage, power/voltage control via MSI Afterburner application) and faster response time.

Finally, the cooling is provided by the TriFrozr fansink (as new as the board is), with three fans (two black, one slightly smaller, 80 mm yellow one, in the middle), a massive aluminum fin array, seven 8mm heatpipes (direct contact with the GPU), and a black shroud with yellow highlights, bearing the Lightning logo.