The Card
Straightaway I am impressed by the appearance of the R9 290X graphics card. The WINDFORCE 3X cooler is sleek and somewhat rugged while still retaining that feel of quality construction. The three cooling fans have a clear smoke tinted finish and look great with the rest of the cooler. The WINDFORCE 3X cooler is only a dual-slot cooler, thankfully, and it cools the heat sink surface directly. The heatsink is almost the same size as the graphics card itself and is constructed of an aluminum block with six copper heat pipes; five of which make direct contact with the GPU underneath. Even though the size of the cooler is pretty impressive, even more impressive is that the graphics card is still reasonably light in weight. The WINDFORCE logo also has a nice font to it, unfortunately it will not be visible if installed facing to the bottom of your chassis. All three cooling fans tie into one single cable that attaches to the graphics card’s PCB. The entire cooler is a single piece and is easily removed for cleaning purposes. The R9 290X connects to your motherboard via a PCI-Express interface that supports up to the 3.0 specification.
The connectivity options available here are abundant in the form of a DisplayPort, an HDMI port, and two DVI ports. The nice feature here is that with this series of graphics cards you may use all outputs at the same time. This single card is capable of driving a tri-monitor setup for some serious HD gaming. This graphics card is also HDMI 1.4a compatible supporting HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies. A new feature for this generation of high-end Radeon graphics cards is the ability to CrossFire without the need for an adapter, since the data can be transferred via the PCI-Express interface. That is why there are no visible CrossFire connectors on the card. Less can be more! This graphics card requires both six and eight-pin power connections to your power supply. GIGABYTE recommends a minimum of a 600W power supply to drive this beast.
