AMD Radeon R9 290X Flagship Volcanic Islands GPU Official – Reclaims The Single GPU Performance Crown From Titan
AMD has officially announced the Radeon R9 290X graphic card, their
latest and greatest flagship GPU of the Volcanic Islands family
featuring the top tier Hawaii chip. AMD also provided a detailed preview
of the Hawaii GPU which is fused inside the heart of the Radeon R9 290X
graphic card. More details regarding the Hawaii GPU can be found here.
AMD Retakes The Performance Throne With the Radeon R9 290X Hawaii GPU
The AMD Radeon R9 290X is the flagship graphic card entry in the
Volcanic Islands R-200 series family from AMD. The new card makes use of
the brand new Hawaii GPU architecture which is aimed directly against
the top dog from NVIDIA aka the
GK110 GPU. The Radeon R9 290X features a full blow Hawaii chip with 2816
Shaders (SPs), 44 ROPs (Raster Operators) and 176 TMUs (Texture mapping units). The Radeon R9 290X GPU is clocked at base clock of 800 MHz and supports GPU boost frequency upto 1000 MHz.
One of the biggest changes made by AMD in their Radeon R9 290X
graphics card is the addition of 512-bit bus interface compared to the
384-bit bus on their last generation Radeon HD 7970. The Hawaii GPU
comes with a total of 4 GB GDDR5 memory which is lower than the GK110
based Titan but higher than the 3 GB GeForce GTX 780 which falls just
around the same price point. The higher 512-bit bus allows for
ridiculously higher bandwidth around 288 GB/s which is sufficient enough
for the Hawaii GPU. There are two CrossFireX connectors
located on the PCB board which means that users would be able to do
Quad-Way CrossFire with four of the Radeon R9 290X graphic cards.
As for the cooling mechanism, the Volcanic Islands series come with a
fresh new shroud design. The new cooling design reminds me alot of the
Radeon 4870 x2 cooler which had a similarly large blower fan. The cooler may not feature the fancy manganese alloy metal as NVIDIA
featured on their Titan and GTX 780 cooler but it still looks
impressive and a move away from the brick shaped Radeon HD 6000 and 7000 series cards. The cooling design incorporates a large vapor chamber which is thrown air from the blower fan and blown out the exhaust vents. The Radeon R9 290X is powered by 6+8 Pin power configurations and has a rated TDP of 270W. Display outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI and a display port.
