14 DAY TRIAL // AMD has released the stupefyingly cheap Radeon R9 290 graphics card, at $399 / €399, and VTX3D was quick to follow up with its own, called VTX3D R9 290 X-Edition.
There's a reason we picked it up before we wrote about any others, from brands arguably better known like ASUS and Gigabyte.
And it's not because this is one of the two boards that skirt the edges of AMD's decree that no customization should happen (the cooler shroud is black instead of grey).
No, what really sets the card apart from the others (except PowerColor's model) is that the VTX3D R9 290 X-Edition (not to be confused with the VTX3D R9 290X) is actually factory overclocked.
That means than instead of 948 MHz, the Hawaii graphics processing unit (GPU) operates at 975 MHz.
It's not that big a difference really, but it's definitely better than nothing, especially when the company had to work around the prohibition against including some stronger capacitors or other PCB components.
On that note, the 4 GB of GDDR5 VRAM work at 1250 MHz (5 GHz effective) over an interface of 512 bits.
The rest of the specifications are the ones we listed when we covered the release of the reference AMD AMD Radeon R9 290.
For those who want a quick rundown though, here they are: 2,560 Graphics CoreNext stream processors, 64 ROPs (raster operating units), 160 TMUs (texture mapping units) and a bandwidth of 320 GB/s.
All in all, the card should have an easy time playing even the latest games at maximum settings, with or without Mantle. The AMD TrueAudio technology will contribute there.
All in all, the VTW3D Radeon R9 290 X-Edition, like all its peers, matches and/or bests the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 while being way cheaper than it ($399 / €399 vs. $499 / €499). On that note, as we have also mentioned elsewhere, the GeForce GTX 770 will probably suffer too, being much weaker than R9 290, but priced at $330 / €330.