Oh yeah, it's finally time review the AMD Radeon R9-290X. The new flagship product has been long discussed, awaited and anticipated. Actually in the next week or so AMD is to launch two products, the Radeon R9-290 and Radeon R9-290X. Both will compete with Nvidia's finest in both performance and price levels. These cards are little beasts. As such this in-depth review will cover the Volcanic Islands GPU architecture, Hawaii for the 290 series, we'll benchmark these cards with FCAT Frametimes, Ultra High Definition and of course, we'll check out game performance with the latest games next to power consumption and heat levels as well. This is one review you don't want to miss out on!

Now before we begin with the new graphics cards, the first thing that you guys will need to get used to is the new naming schema. AMD ended with the Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series graphics cards in 2013. Logic dictates that AMD would have continued with a series 9000. But hey now, we already have had the Radeon 9000 series many years ago (2003), oh and who doesn't remember the Radeon 9800 Pro right? As such it was time to bring in a new naming scheme, a bit more in line with AMD's APUs. R9 will be high-end and R7 will be mainstream and inevitably R5 being entry level. After that you'll notice products being tagged as 250, 260X, 270X, 280X and the coolest two of them all are the Radeon R9 290 and R290X.

This review will cover the Radeon R9 290X, the regular 290 still needs to be released. We can say though that these two products are based on the new Hawaii GPU. The products will get impressive clock frequencies and, much like NVIDIA, boost power, voltage, fan and load limiters. The two R9 290 cards with that new silicon comes with a truckload of new features like integrated DSPs offering TrueAudio technology.