PowerColor R9 290 Review

PowerColor R9 290 Review and Comparison

Introduction

Our review of the R9 290X caused a little bit of a stir. Apparently manufacturers aren’t too happy with honesty, and thus when we said how little love we had for the cooler on the R9 290X and thus how it became a massively limiting factor AMD decided we weren’t going to be allowed to review the regular R9 290.

But we’re not so easily swayed here at OC3D. So thanks to our friends at PC Specialist we have a system in for review atm that has the option of a GTX770 or an R9 290. We thought it would be rude not to get it on our own test bench for a look and see how it compares in our graphs and see if the slight reduction in specifications coupled to a big reduction in price is enough to tempt us, or if it’s a model too far in a crowded marketplace.

Priced between the GTX770 and the GTX780, this has the potential to be a very wise purchase indeed, and if the scores are similar to the 290X then it might become a best seller. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Technical Specifications

As you can see there is only a small difference between the R9 290 and its bigger brother the R9 290X. 16 fewer TPUs and 256 fewer Stream Processors, alongside slightly reduced clock speeds, are really the only obvious changes. We’ve already covered the Hawaii GPUs in depth with our 290X review, so let’s crack on.

PowerColor R9 290 Â