Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X 4GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

Overclocking Sapphire’s R9 290 Tri-X graphics card was disappointing to say the least. Our reference design card managed 1110MHz on the core and 1550MHz on the memory but Sapphire’s variant managed a modest 1060MHz on the core (that’s 50MHz less) and a puny 1360MHz on the memory (190MHz less). However, performance was still better than the reference design at higher clocks because the Sapphire card is able to make it through the whole benchmark suite without ever throttling. The final overclock we achieved is 12% higher than the R9 290 reference stock clocks for the core and 9% higher for the memory (stock clocks are 947MHz core and 1250MHz memory). Sapphire’s overclocked R9 290 Tri-X proves a worthy rival for Nvidia’s more expensive GTX 780 offerings.