Product Photos - AMD R9 290X

So when we take the product apart, we can have a little better look at cooling and PCB design. The cooler really is a vapor chamber based cooling solution that sucks in air from the PC innards and tries to exhaust through the left of the card and thus outside the PC. The card will get hot though, so some residual heat will definitely end up inside the PC. Good ventilation as such is a must.
 

Once we remove the cooler we can have a look at the PCB itself. A very clean PCB with 7 power phases. The card has sixteen GDDR5 memory chips (all of which are on the cooler), a 5+1+1 phase VRM design, which uses CPL-made chokes, IR-made DirectFETs, and a new IR-made VRM controller. The AMD “Hawaii” GPU is fabbed by TSMC on a 28nm process and has a die size of 438 mm2. 

AMD Radeon R9-290X takes it power through one 8-pin and one 6-pin PCIe power connector. The AMD Radeon R9-290X will pretty much compete with NVIDIA's GTX 780 and Titan cards. The card competes really well with them in terms of raw game performance. But let's startup the initial set of tests, okay?