Sapphire 290/290X Tri-X series
In short the best card I've tested yet, why?
Its an AMD reference board with AMD components, so AMD VRM, AMD Direfet and Hynix memory. Sapphire have kept the PCB as AMD intended, so good on them!
The cooler is huge, this card is very long, were talking 7990 long, so make sure you can fit it in before buying one. The cooler is more powerful than any other cooler I've ever tested, it even beats the reference cooler at 100% fan by some margin, like 20c+ and the fans can push huge amounts of air if you set them to 80% or higher. OK its not as quiet as a WindForce or an MSI Gaming, but its damn close, but what it can do is outperform their coolers maximum ability by a good 15c+
As such the Sapphire Tri-X cards are perfect cards for overclockers, benchmarkers and miners. Its also a superb gaming card, but I'd say the MSI / Gigabyte are better suited as they cost less, take up less room and are a little quieter.
In my testing I was able to achieve 1260MHz core, WOW! and wait for it 7000MHz memory, I did not cherry picking, this was one card I took from stock and its a monster, but looking at reviews and feedback from owners, the overclocks look exceptional. Also Sapphire Trixx software allows upto +200mv which no doubt explains the huge overclock a little too. But even at such high clock speeds with the fan at 100% the cooler kept everything below 70c, even when mining. I've not seen any card cool this well with such clocks and big amounts of voltage.
Their 290 is also just as good, hitting 1250MHz area on core and 6600-6800MHz on the memory, Sapphire write really good BIOS's it seems as their cards clock so well and get superb mining hash rates.
Onto mining this is the only card which had no heat issues at all, even with three cards all closely next to each other mining away, infact the cooler was so good the hottest card got upto like 73c and the other two remained below 70c, that's a superb achievement.
Again Sapphire seem to be only using Hynix memory!
Hash rate 290X - 950-1000
Hash rate 290 - 875-950
This is my favourite 290/290X card yet!
