MSI Radeon R9 290X Gaming OC PCB Pictured

We can now see the first released picture of the PCB which can be spotted under the hood of MSI’s Radeon R9 290X Gaming OC graphics card. This was first revealed in Japan on the weekend and details of this have already been published in an older article.

msi-r9-290-pcb

It now seems that MSI is going to be making use of the same board design (with the back-plate included) on both the R9 290X Gaming OC as well as the R9 290 Gaming OC. Both these models of graphics cards have been set up for pre order by NCIX which is a Canadian e-tailer. Talking of the R9 290X Gaming OC, it has been priced at an estimated $699 CAD (US $660) and the price is inclusive of the taxes. On the other hand the R9 290 Gaming OC is available at $529.99 CAD (US $500), with taxes included.

Now talking about the PCB, it appears to be a slight variation of the MSI on AMD’s reference design. The layout is surely same, yet there are some contrasts and only a few differences in the component decisions which MSI has made and if one was not to notice too quickly, it wouldn’t even have been differentiated. You can take an example here of how it has discarded the Coiltronics-made chokes for MagicTech ones. And in place of the older Elpida on a dominant part of retail R9 290 series boards, it has utilized the Sk Hynix made memory chips. And also it has retained the dual BIOS.

Consistent with what NCIX says, both the cards will feature untouched memory clock speeds of 5.00 GHz, which will lead a memory transfer speed of 320 GB/s, but they feature 5-7 percent overclocks on the GPU. The R9 290 Gaming OC have GPU clock speeds which can reach up to a 1000 MHz (as opposed to the 948 MHz on the reference reference). The R9 290X Gaming OC on the other hand features 1040 MHz.