Rumors about the Radeon R9 290X Battlefield 4 bundle being postponed for unknown reasons have now been taken care of as the bundle is now available for pre order with a specific number of Swedish retailers. Now that the pre order availability of the bundle has been confirmed with this news, the specifications have also been unveiled. We also have access to the benchmark score in 3DMark 2013. Much of the specifications which we managed to get our hands on came from the leaked images of the GPU-z and these were for the Radeon R9 280X, Radeon R7 260X and Radeon R7 240 but now we have much information about the R9 290X as well.
It has now been confirmed that the AMD’s Radeon R9 290X is powered by the most powerful chip ever designed by AMD; the flagship Hawaii GPU. This Hawaii GPU architecture aims towards the highest performing GK110 GPU by NVIDIA.
AMD’s Radeon R9 290X is clocked at a base clock of 800 MHz and with the GPU boost, the clock speed reaches up to 1000 MHz with a clock speed of memory being 5 GHz. The last generation Radeon HD 7970 featured a 384-bit interface but AMD has slightly made changes to their latest release of R9 290X as it has been equipped with the 512-bit bus interface. This higher bit interface allows for a greater bandwidth of 300 GB/s which is quite sufficient for the Hawaii GPU architecture. The memory of the Radeon R9 290X falls somewhere between NVIDIA’s Titan (based on the GK110) and GeForce GTX780 because it features a total of 4 GB GDDR5 of memory which is lower than the Titan but extends by 1 GB from the GeForce GTX780’s 3 GB.
With the help of the CrossFireX technology by AMD, the card allows Quad-Way GPU functionality without the need of any CrossFire cable. This is because the signals are already being sent over by the PCI bus interface. AMD claims that this new technology allows the card to take advantage of the Eyefinity and UltraHD (4K) resolution setups. This also provides full compatibility with the Catalyst frame pacing technologies which will prevent any frame pacing issues from taking place.
VideoCardz found the pre order listing and it can be deduced that the card is priced at $800 at the moment but nothing can be confirmed and it looks like we’ll have to wait for the official pre orders to start by the retailers or AMD itself. The official release date for the card is 15th October.
The benchmark scores reveal that the card is indeed faster than GeForce GTX 780 and also the GeForce GTX Titan. The Radeon R9 290 is a slower versions and its true competitor is going to be the upcoming GeForce GTX 770 Ti by NVIDIA.
Source: VideoCardz | News Archive