Overall and Final Verdict
Considering the last few cards I have taken a look at have been R9 270X’s I was especially excited for the R9 290 Tri-X to come in. On top of finally getting a chance to see the performance of one of AMDs newest cards, I was very happy with the last Toxic card I had in the office. The R9 290 Tri-X from Sapphire really caught my eye once again with its orange styling and Tri-X triple fan cooling design. When taking a tour around the card I was a little disappointed to see a few of the key features from the R9 280X Toxic not included, specifically the backpate and the backlit Sapphire logo on top. It seems a little weird to me that they would drop features when moving up in performance, but the Toxic cards are considered a step up from the Tri-X. Even so Sapphire did a great job of adding in value in other places like with the free HDMI cable that they bundled in with the card.
My other concerns were with the slightly noisy fans when turned all the way up to 100% and the memory overclocking issues I ran into. Honestly at idle and 50% the noise performance was great. As long as you aren’t manually cranking the fans up you shouldn’t require earplugs. That is good because otherwise the Tri-X cooling did a good job of keeping the card cool, especially when dominating in nearly all of our performance tests. The only card that outperformed the R9 290 Tri-X was the GTX 780 Ti, and let’s be honest it is in a different price range currently.
At $449.99 the R9 290 Tri-X isn’t a cheap card by any means, but it did perform up to its price. You are paying a nice premium over the reference design, specifically $50 over the reference R9 290. At that price difference it would have been nice to have the backplate included in my opinion. But the fact is, right now these cards are selling for WELL over their MSRP because the demand is there. That shows you how bad people want them, so if you have the chance to pick one up for your next build I would recommend it.