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Sapphire Tri-x Radeon R9 290x 8GB Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The Sapphire Tri-x R9 290x has an estimated retail price of $429. This seems a very fair price compared to the current price of the Vapor-X model and its performance across all of our tests. It can currently be found at Overclockers UK for £349.99.

Overview

This card packs 8GB of VRAM, which is amazing for a consumer card. Sadly in our testing, none of our benchmarks proved demanding enough to utilise any more than 3.5-4GB of VRAM. None the less, this card has brilliant future-proofing with the release of more and more demanding games; this card should be a prime choice for gamers looking at these games and playing above 1440p. On the other hand, professional users could benefit from purchasing these graphics cards for video editing and high-quality image editing. These graphics cards could shave hundreds of pounds (£) off the price of purchasing the professional series of graphics cards such as the FirePro W7100. Also, they would be a great bragging point in the looks department compared to the boring “box” look of the FirePro series.

Using this card has been a breeze. Simple and easy installation with the very rigid card, which is good considering there is no back plate. Without actually looking at the card, I could swear it was running passively; it was running that quiet. The colour combination is amazing in my opinion and is detailed to a very high standard. Performance wise, it lacks the full performance of its Vapor-X counter part, but the price reflects this. Not only the card, but the amount of resources bundled with this card make it a very tempting deal. For once I’m also going to say that the Trixx software was pleasant to use and functioned well, although it is a bit boring to look at.

The actual card we’ve reviewed today has been terrific and nothing bad can really be said. However, due to the lack of demanding benchmarking software, the utilisation of more than 4GB of VRAM hasn’t been seen in today’s testing.

If I was to recommend anything, it would be to add-on a back plate. Even if this back plate was plain metal with “Tri-x” on the back, it would be more something that can add to the premium feel and finish off this product. Also, I would possibly look into bundling some games with this graphics card that can use more than 4GB of VRAM, just so the consumer has the ability to play something demanding.

Pros