I've only been in the shoes of the Video Card Editor for just over a month now, but I've written four reviews of NVIDIA cards with this review being the first AMD review I've written. I wrote some news a couple of weeks ago when SAPPHIRE announced its new SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290X 8GB Tri-X video card, so I reached out to the company to secure a sample for review.
Well, days later it arrived, so I got right into it. I already have the Vapor-X version of the 8GB card from SAPPHIRE, but this is the new Tri-X version that I was excited to test out. SAPPHIRE has had a great run with its Tri-X coolers, as they've been popular among all types of consumers.
There aren't many cards with 8GB of VRAM, but there are less games that can fully utilize the 8GB of VRAM, so we will do some specific testing on the SAPPHIRE Radeon R9 290X 8GB Tri-X to see if the 8GB of VRAM makes a difference. I don't think it will, but we have some tricks up our sleeve that will try and get that 8GB of VRAM crying for mercy.
SAPPHIRE is using the ageing, but still impressive Hawaii XT GPU, which has SAPPHIRE's excellent Tri-X cooler on top. We have 8GB of VRAM versus the usual 4GB of VRAM, a 512-bit memory bus coming in off the back of the various 128-bit and 256-bit memory buses we've been using on the Maxwell-based cards from NVIDIA.
We're seeing SAPPHIRE tweak an architecture that AMD unveiled back in 2013, so there's not much more they can do with the card unless they think outside of the box like SAPPHIRE has, providing 8GB of VRAM and splashing an improved cooler with its Tri-X technology.
SAPPHIRE is selling the Radeon R9 290X 8GB Tri-X video card on Newegg right now for $459.99, which is not too bad at all considering you get 8GB of VRAM. There is plenty of stock, with a limit of 5 per customer enforced by Newegg.