With AMD’s Radeon R9 290X card fully reviewed, detailed and available from last Thursday the PC tech leak and rumour mill turned with determination towards the non-X variant of the graphics card this weekend. According to an AMD Account Manager in China we should see reviews and the full specifications of the Radeon R9 290 revealed on Halloween (Thursday). We saw the hardware spec of the Radeon R9 290 from a Japanese retailer leak earlier in the month. Leaks in recent days have expanded the information publically available on this new Radeon by including various benchmarks, photos of AMD partner made graphics cards and pricing indications.
AMD Radeon R9 290 benchmarks
The Chinese ChipHell forum is packed with news, pictures and benchmarks of the AMD Radeon R9 290. On this forum we can see pictures of a 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme score for a system using an AMD Radeon R9 290 achieving X4138 and 4536. The same system packing an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 scored X4252 and 4132 respectively.
There are more benchmarks available from a site called DarkLord (via WCCF) which compares the AMD Radeon R9 290 with both the AMD Radeon R9 290X and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780. Have a look at that below, on the right:
As well as these benchmarks it is open to speculation whether OverClockers.co.uk has already listed AMD Radeon R9 R290 benchmarks in its forums - blurred out as “NDA OC” and “NDA Std” for overclocked and standard cards... There’s an example of the Heaven 3.0 1440P benchmark slide below. Only this and 3DMark are published.
What's been blurred out?
Radeon R9 290 hardware pictures and price indication
A nice selection of pictures featuring a Sapphire branded AMD Radeon R9 R290 was published on ChipHell today. I’ve included a selection of these littered around this article but there are more at the source if you wish to gander.
Finally, what kind of money will you have to fork out to get your hands on AMD’s upcoming slightly snipped GPU featuring 256 less stream processors and an engine running 53 MHz less fast than the top of the range Radeon R9 R290X? TechPowerUp says the Radeon R9 R290 price will be a full $100 less than the Radeon R9 R290X, coming in at $449.
