14 DAY TRIAL // AMD, or at least its OEMs, wanted to get the 8 GB Radeon R9 290X graphics cards out on the market before NVIDIA had a chance to do the same with the GeForce GTX 980, so here we are.
We've already seen some of the other boards out there, even though they're mostly unavailable for order just yet. They will be any day now though. Unfortunately, that also means that prices are hard to come by, so we can only assume that they're of around six hundred dollars / euro.
MSI's board might end up selling for a bit more than the rest, because it is 10 MHz faster than them. But that might not matter that much, since the memory makes more difference than a small factory overclock when playing 4K games.
Whatever the case ends up being, there will be quite a few models to choose from. PowerColor itself has just unveiled the PCS+ R9 290X 8 GB GDDR5.
The PowerColor PCS+ R9 290X 8GB GDDR5
As you may have guessed, the card has a custom PCB, cooler and factory overclocked GPU and memory. Although with all other 8 GB R9 290X cards working the RAM at 5.5 GHz, maybe there's no overclocking there at all.
The board does have a faster than normal GPU though, compared to the standard R9 290X. Where the 4GB original operated at 1 GHz, this one reached 1,030 MHz.
That's 10 MHz behind MSI's 8 GB Radeon R9 290X but on the same level as the Sapphire and Club 3D adapters.
The cooler makes it resemble the Sapphire card more than the others, being a three-fan model itself. It should be able to keep the card 24% cooler and 17% quieter than the reference one, as long as you don't manually overclock the thing.
There's even a metal black plate and shroud, to maximize the endurance and cooling dissipation efficiency of the video adapter.
All in all, you should have everything you need, and then some, to run a game at ultra-high definition resolution, both on a single monitor / TV and on multi-screen setups.
Availability and pricing
The PowerColor PCS+ R9 290X 8 GB graphics card, with its 2,816 Stream Processors, two dual-link DVI -D port, HDMI, DisplayPort and 515-bit memory interface, should be put up for sale soon at the price we mentioned before. The Peak Efficiency up to 93.2% (via PowIRstage and Multi Phases Design) might add a premium though.