14 DAY TRIAL // The Radeon R9 290X is already the best single-GPU video board from Advanced Micro Devices, but OEMs like to overclock their products anyway, and that's exactly what HIS has just done.
The company has formally launched the Radeon R9 290X IceQ X² Turbo graphics card, which has a faster GPU than normal, as well as a different cooler.
Whereas the regular R9 290X has a single-fan cooling module, the Radeon R9 290X IceQ X² Turbo utilizes one with two spinners (diameter of 100 mm each). That's why it's called IceQ X², although the cream/gold colored shroud is a bit odd for the name.
It also happens to be one of the few Radeon R9 290 cards on the market with a blue printed circuit board.
Anyway, the GPU frequency of the video adapter is 1060 MHz, while the memory is left untouched, at 5 GHz. This seems to be standard for factory OC video cards: overclock the GPU but leave the VRAM as it is.
All in all, the HIS Radeon R9 290X IceQ X² Turbo graphics card has a bandwidth of 320 GB/s (the 512-bit interface makes it possible). Sadly, the price is unknown, and having seen R9 290X cards priced at $449 / €449 to over $700 / €700, we can't really guess what it is.