The R9 290X Devil 13 is bound to make some waves in the gaming world, not only due to the fact that it carries on a well-established PowerColor tradition that has seen them launch some of AMD's most powerful GPUs. You may not remember but back in August of 2012, Hardware Canucks was among the first to report that the HD 7990 would be launched in the guise of PowerColor's HD 7990 Devil 13. That cards boasted absolutely awesome performance metrics, beating the GTX 690 in numerous benchmarks provided its Turbo Mode was used. Naturally, AMD went on to ?officially? launch the HD 7990 but the Devil 13 has always remained in our minds as one of the best custom products launched in the last two years.

Fast forward to a few months ago and AMD rolled out their long-anticipated R9 295X2. Not only did it take NVIDIA completely by surprise but it approached cooling in a new and innovative way (for a reference card that is); instead of sticking to a sometimes-inefficient air based heatsink, AMD incorporated a water cooling setup. As a result, its dual R9 290X cores were able to operate at full speed without the throttling and it demolished everything in its path.

PowerColor's R9 290X Devil 13 goes back to basics by utilizing virtually the same specifications as the R9 295X2 but backing things up with an infinitely more adaptable fan-based heatsink. Ditching the water cooler wasn't easy since the Hawaii cores and 8GB memory produce an astonishing amount of heat but the Devil 13 compensates by throwing a massive amount of thermal dissipation power at the problem.