Nvidia launched the 700 series and really took the market by storm with the capability to offer exceptional power savings and super strong performance per watt, along with cool running cards which makes for a great gaming package. However nothing ever is safe for very long and with that AMD showed off their new R series of cards to compete. Unfortunately for AMD, almost all of the models in the R series were actually existing chips with a new name. The exception was the flagship product–the R9-290X.

The R9-290X takes the TITAN head on, and the price point is a real killer for the gaming market, but this kind of value does not come without compromises. Unfortunately, these come in the form of 92-95C loaded temps and noise which can be akin to a vacuum cleaner inside your chassis. But even with these issues this got a lot of performance enthusiasts’ attention as some of these issues can be relieved with liquid cooling fitment or just dealing with the heat on quiet mode.

Nvidia today releases the answer to 290X, and really the answer to what gamers have been seeking since Kepler or TITAN launched almost a full year ago. As TITAN launched we finally saw Nvidia take a step into its enterprise GPU lineup to give an insanely capable GPU to the consumer gaming lineup and now Nvidia has upped the ante by giving a full GK110 GPU to a gaming GPU which still is well below the 1K pricepoint where the TITAN presently resides.