After months of rumours and media hype, AMD’s new flagship graphics card is here. We have a launch-day review for you guys to read and we’re putting this brand new GPU through its paces on the eTeknix graphics card test system. We’re very excited to bring you this review because everyone loves to see how a new flagship GPU performs and what it can deliver, even if you have no intention of ever buying it. The AMD R9 290X is a brand new GPU crafted from the same 28nm process as the HD 7000 series but using a revised architecture design (GCN 2.0 vs GCN) and a new GPU die codenamed “Hawaii”.

The AMD R9 290X brings a number of new features to the table which we will cover briefly but first let’s check a run down of the specifications. AMD’s R9 290X is a big step up from the R9 280X (HD 7970) featuring 768 more stream processors, 1.5 more TFLOPS of compute performance, 32GB/s more memory bandwidth, double the number of ROPs and much more. A default clock speed of up to 1GHz on the core and up to 5GHz on the memory is deployed, this will vary dynamically as it is adjusted by AMD’s revised PowerTune technology, which leads us on nicely to the next part – the new features of the R9 290X.