The AMD R9-290X, despite its very good performance, never really got our taste buds tingling. It wasn't the boring aesthetics, nor was it the volcanic temperatures of the GPU requiring nothing less than Rolls-Royce supercharger to keep it cool. No, it was all three. You see, we can forgive a hot running card if it is quiet yet powerful. We can overlook a noisy card if it runs cool but gives us the grunt we desire. We can even ignore a boring exterior as it's what's inside that counts right? What is unforgivable and the cardinal sin AMD exercised with the R9-290X, was that they created a graphics card that was horrendously noisy, crazy hot and looked (in our opinion) worse than the card it replaced. Sure it was fast, very fast actually, but is that enough?