Performance between 780 and Titan
We got some new information about the soon to launch Radeon R9 290X. The card that is supposed to launch tomorrow, October 24th in the US and on the 25th in most parts of Europe. There is a time difference of 9 hours between Pacific Time and Central European time.
The Radeon R290X based on AMD’s new Hawaii chip and it should be selling later on the 24th in the US in etail and select retailers for $549 + tax, which sounds quite amazing for a card that can run faster than the Geforce GTX 780 and in Uber mode can even outrun the Titan selected games. EU listings point to €649 including VAT, which sounds about right. Its main competitor, the GTX 780, has an MSRP of $649, but Asus has cards listed for as little as $535.
Of course there is a catch. In quiet mode the card beats Geforce 780 in some games and benchmarks, not all of them. In Uber mode it needs a lot more power and ends up louder than the Radeon HD 7970 Gigahertz edition. People described the cooler noise in Uber noise as quite loud to us, but we must add that we still haven’t heard it firsthand. In Uber mode the R290X is fast enough to win against Titan in a few benchmarks, but not all.
However, there’s a caveat – our sources claim that AMD has not sent out the official price just yet, so even a day before launch it could still change.
http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32915-radeon-r9-r290x-aims-at-$549-pre-tax-price
Radeon R9 290 (non-X) Launch Date Revealed
Around all the buzz surrounding the Radeon R9 290X, we're ignoring its smaller, more affordable sibling, the Radeon R9 290 (non-X). It's being reported that the SKU will be formally launched on the 31st of October, 2013. From leaked AMD presentation slides, we know that the R9 290 is based on the same 28 nm "Hawaii" silicon as the R9 290X, but with a lower stream processor count, standing at 2,560, and a proportionately lower TMU count, at 160. The rest of the components on the chip are untouched, it still features a 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 4 GB of memory. The GPU core is clocked up to 946 MHz, and memory at 5.00 GHz, churning out 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth. The leak also highlighted the review NDA lifting time for the R9 290X, which is tomorrow.
http://www.techpowerup.com/193056/radeon-r9-290-non-x-launch-date-revealed.html
If the pricing pans out, we can probably get the non-x 290 in the $400's. I'm glad I didn't pull the trigger on the 280X.
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