In our whirlwind tour of R9 290X cards, one thing is becoming evident: with the right amount of attention to cooling, AMD's flagship GPU is truly able to shine. We?ve seen the likes of XFX, Gigabyte and ASUS equip their wares with increasingly impressive heatsinks and the results have been nothing short of spectacular. Now PowerColor is about the join their ranks with their R9 290X PCS+ and at the risk of preempting our own conclusion, this might very well be the best Hawaii-based graphics card around.

There have been a large number of complains that AMD's GPU sales are being dominated by folks using their cards for crypto currency mining. From the epic price premiums being commanded by the entire Radeon lineup to some pretty drastic stock shortages, there are a huge number of reasons for concern but AMD and their board partners have been reaping the short-term benefits. This situation has also resulted in perks for end users as some companies have begun over-building their cards in an effort to improve longevity under the constant stresses of mining. PowerColor's aims are exactly that; design the PCS+ for optimal performance in games but also reinforced its design with heavily upgraded components in an effort to reduce RMA frequency.