14 DAY TRIAL // Now that there's no prohibition in place against custom Radeon R9 series designs, AMD's OEMs are introducing their new video boards. Sapphire has just done it actually, revealing the R9 290 and R9 290X Tri-X.
As one will probably guess just by looking at the things, the Tri-X comes from the triple-fan cooler strapped to both adapters.
Initially used on the R9 280X Toxic edition, the cooler has dust-repelling bearing fans with aerofoil section blades, plus fan cowling that routs air across the hottest board areas.
The cooler was necessary because while the PCB was left alone, the clocks of the graphics processing units were not.
We'll look at the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X first. Normally, the Hawaii graphics processing unit, with its 2,816 stream processors, runs at 1000 MHz.
Here, though, it operates at 1040 MHz. On that note, the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM are overclocked too, from 1250 MHz (5 GHz effective) to 1300 MHz (5,2 GHz effective). Thus, the memory bandwidth is improved by 4%, to 332.8 GB/s.
The Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X has the same memory overclock and capacity as the Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X but the GPU (2,560 stream processors this time) operates at 1000 MHz, rather than the stock 947 MHz.
A final asset that Sapphire has implemented in its R9 290 and R9 290X Tri-X graphics cards is the dual BIOS technology.
Basically, there are two BIOS chips. One of them ensures the specifications we have outlined above, and the second acts as a backup, with reference specs. It's so that you can always boot the adapter in case of failure on the part of the tweaked clocks.
Not that Sapphire expects anything like that to happen, but it does fully expect the possibility to arise if buyers manually overclock the board further without being careful about an upper limit.