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I own less than 5 of these 290x. Assorted brands. They overheat (not a problem until they start cooking your sound card). The fans are so incredibly loud and make so little difference in temperature, you can not set your monitor to 1080p 120hz manually because of lack of driver support (I can do this with nvidia), you will get black screens after playing for hours under mysterious conditions (your entire screen goes black). Have a driver problem? Get ready to re-install windows, the software is so toxic you have to reformat the hard drive if it didn't work the first time. I am sure I could go on but thousands of dollars later I just don't care for them. Pros: great looking spec numbers that do not work in real life, Cheap by comparison to the real thing. If you would like to simulate the console experience on a PC I highly recommend AMD. Just remember to lower your settings.—Sep '14
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In terms of absolute minimum FPS and superior fundamental performance, the 290x is vastly superior to the 970 at everything except maximum burst framerate at 1080p, an absolutely useless performance metric commonly used by reviewers and nvidia to hide issues with relative smoothness.
In terms of minimum FPS, the 290x is also very comparable to the 980, especially when you consider the superior crossfire implementation, yielding considerably better minimum FPS and scaling than 'SLI' will ever be capable of without a major hardware and complimentary software overhaul. SLI is broken. Crossfire is NOT. You can see nearly 100% scaling in a surprising number of titles. Add in a mantle/dx12 forward-looking arch, and clearly this iteration of GNC will continue in the spirit of GCN 1.0: fantastic compute performance that developers have only begun to utilize effectively. Just take note of how poorly the 680 compares to the 7950, let alone 7970.—Apr '15
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Flagship performance with a hefty aftermarket cooler for $300, and very overclockable.
Unbeatable price:performance for single-card ultra settings solutions.—Apr '15
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Great GPU 290X 8GB X2 (crossfire) @ 1080 x 5670 Best GPU's ever. destroys everything! —Aug '15
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