Sapphire Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC Review: Our First Custom Cooled 290

Final Words

As we mentioned towards the start of this review, immediately following the launch of the Radeon R9 290 series and leading up until now there has been a lot of chatter and a lot of questions over the subject of custom 290 series cards. Customized, open air cooled cards is all but obligatory these days, so the fact that we’re now looking at these cards is in and of itself not all that surprising. Even in a more typical launch these cards attract quite a bit of attention due to the various tweaks worked into their designs by board partners and the greater variety of options that come from this process. But the launch of the 290 series has been atypical due to the fact that we don’t normally put this much attention on customized cards or await their arrival quite this eagerly.

We’ve already written a small tome on the reference 290 so we won’t completely rehash that here, but in summary, while AMD had a major hit on their hands with the 290 with respect to pricing and performance this came at the cost of noise. The cooling performance required to hit those performance marks meant that the reference 290 was not as well balanced of a card as we’ve seen in previous launches. For cases where noise wasn’t a concern (both in the literal and figurative sense) this was a fine tradeoff, but in other cases where noise was a concern the reference 290 missed the mark compared to other blowers. Ultimately this has fueled a greater than usual interest in custom cards – and more specifically the open air coolers they’re typically equipped with – as open air coolers offer a better acoustic profile than blowers like the one used in the reference 290.

This brings us to the subject of today’s review and the very first of the custom 290s we’ve seen, Sapphire’s Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC. The 290 Tri-X OC is just one of what will be many customized designs to be released in the weeks to come, but it represents something much bigger and much more important in the AMD ecosystem: variety. The lack of balance in the AMD reference design has opened up the door to board partners to offer designs that lean the other way, making different tradeoffs to reach different results, and this is the path Sapphire has followed for their 290 Tri-X OC.

Without putting the weight of the entire 290 series on a single card, the 290 Tri-X OC is exactly the 290 card AMD needs to have hit the market to bring that necessary variety to the market. From a performance perspective and an acoustics perspective the 290 Tri-X OC has exceeded our expectations for an open air cooled card, and in the process proves that you can have a quiet 290. A very quiet 290, as it turns out. 41dB(A) under load would already be an impressive result for a high end card, but especially contrasted against the 57dB(A) reference 290 it becomes outright sublime.

And while a large part of these remarkable results has to do with the style of the cooler used, Sapphire deserves a lot of credit for seemingly doing everything right in putting this card together. Even among open air cooled cards the 290 Tri-X OC is well ahead of the pack on acoustics (all the more so when you consider the thermal loads involved) and at the same time Sapphire has hit the mark on build quality and overall performance. We've seen a number of open air designs over the years, but few of them would qualify as being as good as what Sapphire has pulled off for the 290 Tri-X OC.

On that note, while Sapphire’s mild factory overclock doesn’t significantly change the performance equation it does reinforce the 290’s strong points. For $450 the card will consistently outperform the GTX 780 or outright tie the 290X in quiet mode, offering equal-to-better performance than those $500+ cards without the noise drawback that came with the reference 290, making it an even more practical replacement for those cards. Given that, Sapphire is essentially charging $50 for a better cooler, but as we’ve seen from our results they can easily justify it due to the fact that there isn’t anything else on the market right now that can match both their performance and their acoustics at the same time.

With that in mind, for all of our concerns over the reference 290 this is the card that will help put to bed a lot of those concerns. For users who were already happy with the 290 nothing really changes, while for those users on the edge over noise concerns this is the card that can deliver on 290’s performance without the noise, albeit by giving up the benefits of a blower. To that end an open air cooler is not always the right solution – the lack of a blower that can compete with NVIDIA’s will continue to exclude the 290 from some builds – but it’s important that both options are available rather than just a blower or just an open air cooler.

Ultimately it is admittedly something of a narrow focus in recommending a card based on noise, but as far as high performance cards go Sapphire has set a very high bar here that we expect few other cards will be able to meet. Both as a 290 card and as a high performance card in general, Sapphire has managed to put together something special.