700 bucks for a 290 is a steal. considering it will blow off the useless gtx 960 and the now defunct 780 kepler cards with the stupid driver update nvidia gave.

+1 agree with this statement

Sapphire R9 290X TriX 4GB to go with .... but check price your budget.

if both is Reference i do not reccomended it unless your planing to change custom Cooler.. if not NO SKIP it get Sapphire R9 290X Trix or VaporX just not REFERENCE cooler.. or you just come back on here LATER TIME COMPLAIN... on the threads...

will installing a custom cooler void the warranty?

sapphire tri-X, Asus DCu ii, MSI twin frozr, MSI lightning, Giga windforce all using custom cooler. The reference cooler are in red black colour scheme.

Think so. They don't want you to mess with their product. BTW, the vanilla 290x already phased out in our country.

Depends on manufacturer, certain brands (eg Gigabyte & Sapphire) do not have 'warranty void if remove' sticker on the screw hence if u carefully remove the default cooler without damage the vram & vrm's thermal tape it should be ok. However still recommend opt for non reference card because very hard to find aftermarket cooler suitable to replace reference card cooler unless u go for WC.

rly ah
i recently contacted sapphire inquiring about thermal pads size to place them between my r9 290 tri-x and my custom backplate..
And their reply was " we don't recommend adding/changing/modding hardware on our cards "
and said that even adding a backplate violate that... and risk of voiding warranty..

U ask them of course they will say so. I RMA my sapphire Tri-x no problem at all

nice processor

mine coming next week its time 2 retire my i5 750 4 good after 6 years of heavy abuse

i also plan 2 change PSU 4 my dual card playing in the future...hopefully is the 390X double since i had crank this shit up 1440p

lastly is SSD 512GB with windows 10 perhaps haha

This post has been edited by skylinelover: Feb 1 2015, 12:18 PM

Gosh feel like bloody Time Slow... when are you coming.. chop chop AMD Graphic... please no Hybrid cooler...

Never mind d. Etech wont exchange my 970 for it so I'm out of luck. Haih. So unlucky. My 970 arrived on the day the news broke.

However, does it matter that I'm playing ONLY at 1080p?

This post has been edited by xKeneshirox: Feb 1 2015, 01:15 PM

For current games, yeah you don't need to worry too much but the card 'lifespan' is gonna be shorter than expected, similar to 660 Ti.

A short photo realistic demo using Unreal 4 engine by Dereau Benoît.
You can download the Unreal Paris demo here.

bro be happy you own GTX 970 3.5GB vram (another 0.5 on different partition when need it be available but at lower speed still 4x faster than System RAM) and if YOU GAME on 1080p or 1440P in any setting you be all GOOD just performance hit when you game on 4K resolution..(hit minimal..)

Taken from Robert Hallock a.k.a Thracks' tweet.
TL;DR, when u use split-frame rendering in multi-GPUs configuration, your effective VRAM capacity is actually (VRAM capacity per card * Total card)? I don't really understand, i thought split-frame rendering already available many years ago.



Sauce: https://twitter.com/Thracks/status/561708827662245888

This means 295x2 is actually 8gb card if the game support mantle.

And if the game support Split-Frame rendering, so far only CIV: Beyond Earth support it in Mantle, not BF4/DA:I/Thief iirc.

Planning to grab R9 290X since it's going to be cheaper, wanted to go for GTX 970 initially

Any recommendations?

Sapphire 290X Tri-X
Powercolor 290X PCS+
MSI 290X Lightning

Lightning probably the best, if you can find one that is still RM1200+ it's a steal, since good custom GTX 970 is even more expensive.