After months of waiting and some pretty high expectations, custom versions of AMD’s ridiculously popular R9 290-series cards have finally been trickling into the retail channel. Granted, crypto currency miners are snatching them up before most gamers can press the “buy” button, some significant strides have been made towards improved availability. While we’ve already taken an in-depth look at ASUS’ R9 290X DirectCU II OC, in this review we’re going towards a slightly more affordable price point with the Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X OC.

At first glance the R9 290 Tri-X OC may seem like a straightforward custom card with the usual massive heatsink but Sapphire has been keen to point out that a ton of development went into this product. With the Hawaii cores housed within all R9 290 cards outputting a significant amount of heat, designing the Tri-X cooling solution was a challenge. Some of this development cost has carried over into this card’s cost as well considering it currently goes for around $599, making it $100 more expensive than the reference version and exactly the same price as most vanilla R9 290X’s. That’s still a far cry from the custom R9 290X cards though, which frequently hit the $700 mark.