AMD has launched the new Radeon R9 290, the second of their Hawaii GPUs based on a tweaked version of the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.
The Radeon R9 290 is very close to its larger sibling, the R9 290X, but retails for a much lower price tag. At launch the R9 290 will cost just $399 in the US and Canada.
That’s $150 down from the R9 290X and $50 down from the price-cut Geforce GTX780.
The R9 290 will be available from this week at several retailers, although stocks will be limited due to high demand overseas. AMD’s RRP is around R6,000 but can be expected to fluctuate as our exchange rate with the Dollar changes.
| Specification |
Radeon R9 290X |
Radeon R9 290 |
Geforce GTX Titan |
Geforce GTX780 |
| Shader Cores |
2816 | 2560 | 2688 | 2304 |
| Raster Operators |
64 | 64 | 48 | 48 |
| Texture units |
176 | 160 | 224 | 192 |
| Clock speed | 727MHz | 727MHz | 837MHz | 863MHz |
| Boost speed | 1000MHz | 954MHz | 876MHz | 900MHz |
| Memory speed | 1250MHz | 1250MHz | 1502MHz | 1502MHz |
| VRAM buffer | 4GB | 4GB | 6GB | 3GB |
| Bus width | 512-bit | 512-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit |
| Bandwidth | 320GB/s | 320GB/s | 288GB/s | 288GB/s |
| TDP | 300W | 300W | 250W | 240W |
| Current price | $549 | $399 | $999 | $500 |
The R9 290 has just a few shaders cut from its chip design, dropping down to 2560 shader cores. That also brings down the total number of texture units to 160, but the number of raster operators, default VRAM size and clock speed as well as the memory bus remains the same.
As is tradition with AMD’s high-end GPUs, the reference heatsinks are the same and do not differ in the slightest.
The video port selection is also identical and the power requirements (and indeed power consumption) are also very similar. The R9 290 is $150 cheaper than the R9 290X, and only a slightly slower.
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Nvidia GTX780 Ti specifications unleashed
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It’s impressive if the price stayed the same converted to Rand, meaning about R3999 but it won’t. So I’m very happy with my R9 280X especially for the price I got it @ 3 and a half and it plays BF4 full graphics so I really can’t complain. Oh and Wesley in the last sentence, remove the “a” 🙂