AMD Radeon R9 290X "Hawaii" turns five years old

In the early 2010s, competition between AMD and Nvidia was fierce and it was still not uncommon for them to take turns sitting on the performance throne. For a few months, Nvidia went around AMD with the first generation Geforce GTX Titan and later in the spring of the scaled-down variant GTX 780.

In the autumn of 2013, AMD contracted with the then completely new graphics circuit Hawaii, which took place in the Radeon R9 290X. This built on the then almost two-year-old architecture Graphics Core Next (GCN) and the number of stream processors was increased to 2,816, up from 2,048 in the previous flagship HD 7970.

This was flanked by a 512-bit wide memory bus with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory, which was unusual in the enthusiast segment at the time. With a turbo frequency of up to 1,000 MHz for the graphics circuit and as much as 320 GB / s, this was enough to beat the GTX 780, but also measure itself with significantly more expensive GTX Titan.

Sadly, AMD does not succeed all the way. The reference design and especially the radiator is not a positive experience. The fact that the graphics card feels cheap in comparison with Nvidia’s luxury models is a problem easy to ignore, but at the same time the fan emits a loud buzz even at low speeds and becomes increasingly unbearable with higher strength.

Despite sky-high performance and competitive price, something that stole a lot of attention was the flawed reference cooler. Over time, this became a non-issue as it was phased out and completely replaced by tailor-made solutions from partner manufacturers.

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Nvidia later came to counter this with the Geforce GTX 780 Ti, which like the GTX Titan came equipped with full-fledged GK110 but with higher clock frequencies and lower price. It was enough to regain the throne, but persistent optimization of drivers has made the R9 290X today the overall faster graphics card (add joke about AMD Fine Wine here).

The Radeon R9 290X is also a graphics card that can be considered to have aged with dignity. Even today, it works to drive around the latest games, provided you are not afraid to compromise on eye candy in games.

Read about how the graphics card performs today – and five years ago: