Sapphire Announce Their Competitively Priced AMD Radeon R9 290

The current wave of AMD R9 290 graphics card releases, that started today with the R9 290’s official launch – check out our review here, are just reference designs with different partner stickers on. This will be the case until AMD lifts the rumoured non-reference embargo on its partners. Once lifted they will be able to release their own custom cooled and custom PCB designs of the R9 290 GPU. Until then there isn’t really much to differentiate current R9 290 offerings, other than price, and one AMD vendor is going a little bit further than the others to bring the cost down for the end user – that’s Sapphire. Sapphire’s R9 290X 4GB graphics card is just a reference design with the usual specifications of the R9 290:

• 2560 GCN Cores
• Up to 947MHz core clock
• 4GB of GDDR5 memory
• 512 bit memory interface
• 1250MHz actual, 5000MHz effective memory clock
• AMD TrueAudio support
• PCI Express 3.0 compatibility
• Direct X 11.2 support
• Mantle API support
• OpenGL 4.3 support
• Native CrossFire X support (without the need for a physical bridge)
• 4K capable
• $399 MSRP

Sapphire’s R9 290 is coming to market at £319.99 at Overclockers and £319.55 from Scan Computers. This is a fair bit cheaper than competing R9 290 graphics cards from other vendors that are in the £330-£380 region. In the USA Sapphire’s R9 290 graphics card is retailing for $399.99 which is again slightly lower than many other vendors who are selling in the $410-$430 region. Sapphire’s R9 290 comes with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. Availability is expected from today, November 5th.

Image courtesy of Sapphire