Product Photos
Product Photos - R9-290X
With an actual possible and playable gaming resolution up-to 3840 x 2160 the MSI Radeon R9-290X Lightning has features like the TriFrozr graphics card cooler and Military Class IV components. The MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning has been fitted with an AMD Hawaii XT graphics processor that is armed with 2816 shader processors, 176 TMUs, 64 Render back-ends and a nice phat 4 GB GDDR5 memory partition that runs over a 512-bit wide bus. The memory clock is 5 Gbps while the GPU ic factory overclocked at 1080 MHz which is roughly 8% above the reference clock frequencies. Obviously both memory and the GPU can be overclocked well beyond that value. Here shall follow a couple of pages with photo's from our photo-shoot.
Packaging first, as always. A nice and shiny yellow themed packaging will await you in the stores, it will be hard to miss that of course. As stated, the graphics card is factory overclocked towards 1080 MHz but more importantly, it is a card that has a proper cooler, a cooler that the GPU deserves and needs.
The card is using an updated TriFrozr design, which has triple fans for pretty good heat dissipation. That cooler kicks booty, it really gives good temperatures overall as it can eat away and dissipate 450W of heat whilst remaining silent. Alongside the card you will receive a quick manual, power converter cables and voltage cables so you can easily use a digital multi-meter with the card to check out some of its voltages. The heart of the MSI Radeon R9-290X Lightning is beast with 6 Billion transistors on a 438 mm2 Die and that 512-bit Memory bus with 4 GB 5.0 Gbps GDDR5 memory. A gorgeous looking card alright.
For the combo of the PCB and a Hawaii XT GPU the following fact is going to be impressive, used here is the most power-ful PCB ever utilized for an AMD Hawaii based GPU as it has a 12+3+2 phase power design. A nice 4 GB of 512-bit memory is fitted on there running at 5.0 Gbps. Anybody with a monitor resolution up-to 2560x1440 can play their games at extremely good quality settings, and with a small tweak or two, Ultra high definition gaming at that Big Whopper of a resolution called UHD - 3840 x 2160 pixels.
Here we can see the connectors, one full DP, one HDMI and two DVI connectors. So yes, Eyefinity works here perfectly fine as well. It might be a very interesting card to setup a cheap desktop multi-monitor setup this way. Not so much for gaming though. AMD allows you to opt for the multi-GPU road with Crossfire as an option. You can pair two in one PC and have them do a decent workout. As mentioned earlier, a Crossfire bridge is no longer needed. The data will be moved over the PCIE (preferably 3.0) bus. The TriFrozr cooler features a total of three fans. The fans can actually programmed independent from each other. For the heatsink itself MSI is using a large dual fin-stack heatsink connected to seven 8 mm-thick heat pipes. That's definitely sufficient if you are a hardcore gamer with very high monitor resolutions. The card is roughly 11 Inches in length which is 29 cm.
