I had a 290X 8 GB from Sapphire. That thing was a blast to overclock and benchmark. I remember thinking “290w TDP is way too much!”. Now at days, it is considered power efficient to have a card under 300 watts.
Same man. I just tried overclocking once because it ran hot enough anyways but this thing was a beast. I talked to someone who told me his 6800xt was efficient with its 300 Watts. In that moment I thought back at the 290x heating up my room by a couple degrees within a 2 hour gaming session. Efficient my ass.
I've now owned... er, at least five 290Xs! I've had a couple of stock ones, an Asus Strix, and I just picked up an MSI Twin Frozr that I haven't tested yet. The stock coolers are underrated, especially after a repaste, though they are noisy as hell. I used that Vapor-X design recently, on a plain 290. It's dramatically better than any of the other coolers I've tried on a Hawaii GPU!
@@mobilegamer101 my vapor x will not activate the middle fan despite the card having a physical toggle on it as well. Both modes and it will not turn on, i have to set the fans manually to 80% to get all 3 to start spinning, i can then dial them back to about 76% and all 3 will stay on, any lower and the fan shuts back off, try cranking your fans manually, maybe that 3rd one will kick on
True story. Had many 7970 Ghz and 280x cards that worked great many years oposed to 290x and 390 that were dying regularly and didnt have lifespan more than 1y (in mining rigs)
I have the exact model, i bought it the last year with a really cheap price because the seller wanted to get it off. And what a jewel. I've used it for a year (now i have another gpu) but that one gave to me all i needed. Never dbelow the 60fps in doom 2016 or eternal, fantastic experience in RDR2. GCN has aged really well not to mention that only this last months we've seen games that starts to trouble with this cards but at this point we had a fantastic card from 2013 (not the mention the 280x vapor x which i had and was unique too)
My Sapphire card was a R9 290Z OC 8 GB card and I used that till I got 2 980 Ti's in SLI then a 2080 Super and Now rocking a 6900 XT FE. My R9 290x 8 Gb OC card was killing it in 1080P and did well at 2k. Still works fine to this day for 1080 P gaming.
Had the Power Color 290x PCS+, totally a beast, two and a half slots like this one, sold it years ago, even at 1440p it can be compare to the newer gtx 980 in performance, one of the best ageing gpus of all time
I had Gigabyte R290x, Windforce 3, great card, served me well from 2013 - 2019 until it died and game that killed it was Civ 6. RIP champion After that i build new PC going from sabertooth p67 and i7 2600k to Ryzen 2700x and bought used RX580 as stop gap but that was 4 years ago, and RX580 is still in use.
I had an Asus r9 290 back in the day. You could unlock some of them to 290X and that worked on mine. Gained 10% performance or so by flashing the card so that was a lot of fun. One of my favorite cards ever for sure.
I managed to find the HIS iPower IceQ model of the card on Ebay for $40! It was a real upgrade from the GTX 960 I had at the time. I had fun overclocking it, even though the fans did get noisy AF.
I HAD THE SAME CARD. YELLOW AND BLACK LOVED IT FOR 5 YEARS Then it failed..... Got the GTX1080. 8G EXTREAMLY PLEASED.. BUT THAT. 290X PLAYING CRYSSIS SO SMOOTH ! ENTHUSIAST MAXED OUT 1080P GAME ME THE BEST TIMES OF MY LIFE
Beautiful card 😍 I may look for one to slam into my retro build to play older games. I was also thinking about GTX 780Ti but I never owned an older AMD card before
I have a sapphire 290x tri-x in my old pc. It does really well, and can overclock quite far on a cooler almost identical to the vapor-x. I've benched it easily achieving RX 480 performance, and if I really push it, I can almost match my overclocked RX 590 as well.
The thermal pads on the memory are the ones that were keeping the card stubbornly stuck - at least that was the case with my R9 280, also from Sapphire.
I still have my MSI Gaming 4G R9 290X. It served me well until I upgraded to an RX 6600 XT late last year. It (the 290X) did well performance-wise at 1080p. The thermal paste job that MSI did wasn't the greatest. I had to re-paste it once because it was running a little hot.
The new PC I built in 2013 included Dual Sapphire Tri-X R9 290x video cards in Crossfire. and yes, they were HOT! I often used them to help offset the heating in my room during the winter.
@@nexus_tech Full Specs: CPU: AMD FX-8150 (Later upgraded to an 8350) Mobo: gigabyte 990fxa-ud5 (Later upgraded to Fatal1ty 990FX Killer) 32 GB DDR3 (4x8) Corsair HX 750W PSU (Later upgraded to 1200W HXi) I mostly played WoW and Apex Legends.
I loved this card, bought the XFX model and it was my first 4k card. The only problem was it ran HOT AF. Mine ended up dying but I couldn't do an RMA on it due to putting an aftermarket cooler on it and losing the original cooler. This was also sadly the last time AMD competed with NVidia on the high end until recently.
Nexus Tech : you did a classic newbie mistake by using only 1 PCI-EX cable with the parasitic daisy chained 8 pin connector....which isn't sufficient in terms of current delivery on such a high end GPU. It causes to under perform due to lack of power delivery and it can damage the PCI-EX cable long term if it has to thin of a copper structure.
I had multiple 290x's what a time to be alive. My top card was powercolor 290x 8G pcs+ (big chunker); below that msi 290x lightening (unicorn overclocker), and multiple other cards, 1 ref, 2 gigabyte windforce (cope), and asus ~ which also felt downgrade from older generation of directcuii and matrix cards... such a disappointment with asus - first time.
love some older radeon cards! i just picked up cib a his radeon hd6870 turbo reference model(always wanted one), and just put some frest mx-6 thermal paste on it.....going to be paired with either winxp or win7 not sure yet....any ideas?
It works very well on Windows 10, but between those two i recommend using win 7, can play with DX10/11 and the OS muticore scheduler is better than on xp, unless you want a purely retro gaming setup, btw check the nimez mod drivers, it had for terascale 3 too
I still have my non-X version of this card and I have to agree that the cooler and board design is still top tier. I hope Sapphire can bring back this type of thinking when designing new cards going forward.
Thanks for sharing 👍There's a video made by Sapphire on YT where one of the engineers describes this cards cooler design, and he's cheekily saying that the temp led has 3 colours, but it never goes to red which is 75 or 80 C 😆 good old Sapphire
Just before I hit play I must insert my opinion here about the 780ti. It must be oced to at least 1340mhz on the shaders before it starts to really show its prowess, even though it is not as fast as Hawaii based gpus today because of the compute heavy nature of games today, and the nvidia card was no match compared to Hawaii in this sense. but back then amd had issues with uneven frame-times and they did not start to look into it until 390/x came out as they got a driver fix for that even though the issue still was there after the fix with even the fury cards. So even if the 290x/390x could outperform nvidia cards fps wise it never felt as smooth as the nvidia cards. Amd is the actually the reason why techtubers/hw outlets started to measure frame times.
Hello mate! The way I measure noise is not scientific lol - the standard suggests min of 1m distance away from the source - in my case it's 15CM. It doesn't really bother me that much for as long I keep it consistent, the result should reflect how noisy card is. This particular cooler was pretty good :)
I had 290x joker club 3d ( i think its that name) with 8gb vram, unfortunately it died. I allso had few saphire toxic (yelow) 290x and gigabyte windforce I think.... All died in mining underclocked and undervolted.
@@nexus_tech I started folding at home in 2011 with c2q 9300 and gtx460 gpu, then I bought hd6990 in 2012 and sold gtx460. That 6990 was making 10$ per day so I quickly made money and bought hd5970 and 7870 after few months. Than I bought 30 280x and 290/ 390 in next few years and in 2017 64 570/580 and gtx1080. To be clear I was student and I was trading cards for crypto that other cards were making. Zero investment beside c2q 9300 and gtx460
Epic card but too powerhungry for me^^ i considered this card but chose the GTX970. Costs the same, gives more FPS, better encoding and lower power draw. With max OC i get like 190 Watt max peak spikes and mostly like 150-170 watts.
Hello mate, thanks for checking out the video :) Agreed, the 970 was finer card, but also newer and bit more expensive. Might be an idea for a GPU Battle hah
I had a 290X 8 GB from Sapphire. That thing was a blast to overclock and benchmark. I remember thinking “290w TDP is way too much!”. Now at days, it is considered power efficient to have a card under 300 watts.
Same man. I just tried overclocking once because it ran hot enough anyways but this thing was a beast.
I talked to someone who told me his 6800xt was efficient with its 300 Watts. In that moment I thought back at the 290x heating up my room by a couple degrees within a 2 hour gaming session.
Efficient my ass.
I've now owned... er, at least five 290Xs! I've had a couple of stock ones, an Asus Strix, and I just picked up an MSI Twin Frozr that I haven't tested yet. The stock coolers are underrated, especially after a repaste, though they are noisy as hell.
I used that Vapor-X design recently, on a plain 290. It's dramatically better than any of the other coolers I've tried on a Hawaii GPU!
I got the 8gb vapor-X model, willing to send it to you along with some other cards if your interested
Did you try crossfiring them ?
I have a lightning version middle fan gone tho but still performs
@@mobilegamer101 my vapor x will not activate the middle fan despite the card having a physical toggle on it as well. Both modes and it will not turn on, i have to set the fans manually to 80% to get all 3 to start spinning, i can then dial them back to about 76% and all 3 will stay on, any lower and the fan shuts back off, try cranking your fans manually, maybe that 3rd one will kick on
Had the 290x tri-x in yellow, outstanding card at the time, i remember being blown away at the size of it lol
I really like the PCB. The cooler is very nice too with that metallic blue.
the yellow sapphire toxic one is also really cool but the vapor x might be my favorite
I am currently using this exact same card. I love the look and it still surprises me with its great performance! I've always been an ATI & AMD fan.
I only had R9 280x back in the day, only good memories with this card and the drivers, no problems whatsoever.
True story. Had many 7970 Ghz and 280x cards that worked great many years oposed to 290x and 390 that were dying regularly and didnt have lifespan more than 1y (in mining rigs)
I have the exact model, i bought it the last year with a really cheap price because the seller wanted to get it off. And what a jewel. I've used it for a year (now i have another gpu) but that one gave to me all i needed. Never dbelow the 60fps in doom 2016 or eternal, fantastic experience in RDR2. GCN has aged really well not to mention that only this last months we've seen games that starts to trouble with this cards but at this point we had a fantastic card from 2013 (not the mention the 280x vapor x which i had and was unique too)
nice that he does old gpus. stuff like this for new gpus are everywhere
My Sapphire card was a R9 290Z OC 8 GB card and I used that till I got 2 980 Ti's in SLI then a 2080 Super and Now rocking a 6900 XT FE. My R9 290x 8 Gb OC card was killing it in 1080P and did well at 2k. Still works fine to this day for 1080 P gaming.
Had the Power Color 290x PCS+, totally a beast, two and a half slots like this one, sold it years ago, even at 1440p it can be compare to the newer gtx 980 in performance, one of the best ageing gpus of all time
There was pcs+ model with 8gb I think. I had Club3D joker with 8gb... Now its probably better for gaming than 980 4gb.
I had Gigabyte R290x, Windforce 3, great card, served me well from 2013 - 2019 until it died and game that killed it was Civ 6.
RIP champion
After that i build new PC going from sabertooth p67 and i7 2600k to Ryzen 2700x and bought used RX580 as stop gap but that was 4 years ago, and RX580 is still in use.
I had an Asus r9 290 back in the day. You could unlock some of them to 290X and that worked on mine. Gained 10% performance or so by flashing the card so that was a lot of fun. One of my favorite cards ever for sure.
As always a great video that helps me learn a bit more about gpu history :).
That is a superb implementation. And for 80 Pounds it was a great price.
I managed to find the HIS iPower IceQ model of the card on Ebay for $40! It was a real upgrade from the GTX 960 I had at the time. I had fun overclocking it, even though the fans did get noisy AF.
Wow! Thanks for sharing! $40 was a steal!!! Where is the card today ?
Yo thats some quality content i'm subing
Thank you! Appreciate it, more to come soon!
I HAD THE SAME CARD. YELLOW AND BLACK
LOVED IT FOR 5 YEARS
Then it failed.....
Got the GTX1080. 8G
EXTREAMLY PLEASED..
BUT THAT. 290X PLAYING
CRYSSIS SO SMOOTH !
ENTHUSIAST
MAXED OUT 1080P
GAME ME THE BEST TIMES OF MY LIFE
Beautiful card 😍 I may look for one to slam into my retro build to play older games. I was also thinking about GTX 780Ti but I never owned an older AMD card before
This model is hard to find in my country. The ones that do have it, sells at ridiculous price. The Toxic model is a lot cheaper, though.
I have a sapphire 290x tri-x in my old pc. It does really well, and can overclock quite far on a cooler almost identical to the vapor-x. I've benched it easily achieving RX 480 performance, and if I really push it, I can almost match my overclocked RX 590 as well.
The thermal pads on the memory are the ones that were keeping the card stubbornly stuck - at least that was the case with my R9 280, also from Sapphire.
What do you replace it with?
@@budiisnadi I reused them.
Hi, thanks for nice review i love it ! have too a xfx 290x and i was in love it when i am using it in 2015-2017 really beautiful and awesome card.
Great to hear! Thanks, I appreciate your feedback :)
I had the 390. I have always went with AMD due to longevity.
I still have my MSI Gaming 4G R9 290X. It served me well until I upgraded to an RX 6600 XT late last year. It (the 290X) did well performance-wise at 1080p. The thermal paste job that MSI did wasn't the greatest. I had to re-paste it once because it was running a little hot.
R9 290X should be in the Hall of Fame of GPU alongside the GTX 1080Ti
I do agree!! 🙂
The new PC I built in 2013 included Dual Sapphire Tri-X R9 290x video cards in Crossfire. and yes, they were HOT! I often used them to help offset the heating in my room during the winter.
Wowers! Lucky you - That had to be a dream setup! Which CPU did you go for back then ?
@@nexus_tech Full Specs:
CPU: AMD FX-8150 (Later upgraded to an 8350)
Mobo: gigabyte 990fxa-ud5 (Later upgraded to Fatal1ty 990FX Killer)
32 GB DDR3 (4x8)
Corsair HX 750W PSU (Later upgraded to 1200W HXi)
I mostly played WoW and Apex Legends.
I loved this card, bought the XFX model and it was my first 4k card. The only problem was it ran HOT AF. Mine ended up dying but I couldn't do an RMA on it due to putting an aftermarket cooler on it and losing the original cooler. This was also sadly the last time AMD competed with NVidia on the high end until recently.
Sapphire is bringing back the vapor-x series this gen,going to be very exciting for premium GPU buyers that seek an very cool and quiet card! :d
Nexus Tech : you did a classic newbie mistake by using only 1 PCI-EX cable with the parasitic daisy chained 8 pin connector....which isn't sufficient in terms of current delivery on such a high end GPU. It causes to under perform due to lack of power delivery and it can damage the PCI-EX cable long term if it has to thin of a copper structure.
Great video. bro! Maybe you can compare this beast with gtx 970? I think Red Team will win this battle again.
I had multiple 290x's what a time to be alive. My top card was powercolor 290x 8G pcs+ (big chunker); below that msi 290x lightening (unicorn overclocker), and multiple other cards, 1 ref, 2 gigabyte windforce (cope), and asus ~ which also felt downgrade from older generation of directcuii and matrix cards... such a disappointment with asus - first time.
love some older radeon cards! i just picked up cib a his radeon hd6870 turbo reference model(always wanted one), and just put some frest mx-6 thermal paste on it.....going to be paired with either winxp or win7 not sure yet....any ideas?
But it kinda works well on win 10
It works very well on Windows 10, but between those two i recommend using win 7, can play with DX10/11 and the OS muticore scheduler is better than on xp, unless you want a purely retro gaming setup, btw check the nimez mod drivers, it had for terascale 3 too
Damn, it's still a capable card even after 9 years.
I had the same looking sapphire 290 (just yellow) before I replaced it with RX 5700 XT, because 480/580 cards weren't really faster. Was a great card
I have the same one you tested with. This is a great card for 1080P.
The GPU looks like an American Muscle car
Yes the lightning version 2x8pin +6 pin beast it was
Sapphire really makes good gpus. Its a pity they only do Amd.
This thing ran RDR2 at 1440P lmaooooo Crazy
I still have my non-X version of this card and I have to agree that the cooler and board design is still top tier. I hope Sapphire can bring back this type of thinking when designing new cards going forward.
Thanks for sharing 👍There's a video made by Sapphire on YT where one of the engineers describes this cards cooler design, and he's cheekily saying that the temp led has 3 colours, but it never goes to red which is 75 or 80 C 😆 good old Sapphire
4gb vs 3gb on the 780ti battle was over right then and there.
Just before I hit play I must insert my opinion here about the 780ti. It must be oced to at least 1340mhz on the shaders before it starts to really show its prowess, even though it is not as fast as Hawaii based gpus today because of the compute heavy nature of games today, and the nvidia card was no match compared to Hawaii in this sense.
but back then amd had issues with uneven frame-times and they did not start to look into it until 390/x came out as they got a driver fix for that even though the issue still was there after the fix with even the fury cards. So even if the 290x/390x could outperform nvidia cards fps wise it never felt as smooth as the nvidia cards. Amd is the actually the reason why techtubers/hw outlets started to measure frame times.
My first pc had a XFX R9 290 man it was a bargain
Hello there, Thanks for sharing! Lucky you, mine came with ATi Rage II :)
R9 290 TriX best GPU after 8800GTX i had.
60db cooling noise not unpleasant to you? Damn I’m a noise freak and 40db and over is too much for me lol. Nice vid tho
Hello mate! The way I measure noise is not scientific lol - the standard suggests min of 1m distance away from the source - in my case it's 15CM. It doesn't really bother me that much for as long I keep it consistent, the result should reflect how noisy card is. This particular cooler was pretty good :)
What is the after market driver for the Sapphire R9 290x 4gig now? I would love to see if there is still something left to get out of my monster.
Hello mate, do you mean NimeZ drivers ? I've not tested those with newer GCN yet, from the other reviews, there might be very small improvement 🙂
@@nexus_tech yes , I am hoping for NimeZ drivers.
I had 290x joker club 3d ( i think its that name) with 8gb vram, unfortunately it died. I allso had few saphire toxic (yelow) 290x and gigabyte windforce I think.... All died in mining underclocked and undervolted.
Ah yes! I've seen few Club3D 7000 series, very interesting looking cards! When did you first get into Crypto mining ?
@@nexus_tech I started folding at home in 2011 with c2q 9300 and gtx460 gpu, then I bought hd6990 in 2012 and sold gtx460. That 6990 was making 10$ per day so I quickly made money and bought hd5970 and 7870 after few months. Than I bought 30 280x and 290/ 390 in next few years and in 2017 64 570/580 and gtx1080. To be clear I was student and I was trading cards for crypto that other cards were making. Zero investment beside c2q 9300 and gtx460
have r9 280x toxic before and damm thouse card look increadible at that time compare to product of another brand
i had a R9 290X Sapphire tri-x OC.
Epic card but too powerhungry for me^^ i considered this card but chose the GTX970. Costs the same, gives more FPS, better encoding and lower power draw.
With max OC i get like 190 Watt max peak spikes and mostly like 150-170 watts.
Hello mate, thanks for checking out the video :) Agreed, the 970 was finer card, but also newer and bit more expensive. Might be an idea for a GPU Battle hah
Use a r9 390x! It had 8 gigs ddr5
Oh yeah! I have it ready, defo in Q1 2023! Thanks for watching the vid, hope you enjoyed :)
Nah, the best GPU from 2013 isn't r9 290x, its monster R9 295x2, which even in 2016 competed with gtx 1080