It's been a while since we last reviewed an R9 290 here at Hardware Canucks; nearly two months in fact. During that time, the R9 295X2 launched, NVIDIA announced the TITAN Z, details about DirectX 12 came out and AMD rolled out another Never Settle gaming bundle. Meanwhile, Sapphire's R9 290 Vapor-X OC, one of the fastest cards available right now, was shown for the first time and we?ve finally been able to take a closer look at it.

Amongst all that industry news one of the most important news items for gamers went largely overlooked: due to various factors, some of the wind went out of the sails of crypto currency mining. Now some of you may be wondering what mining has to do with this review and the answer to that is simple: due to their relative strength in crunching numbers, the AMD's graphics cards? retailer-bound pricing structure was literally tied at the hip to the popularity of Bitcoin, Litecoin and countless other virtual currencies. At the height of the mining craze Radeon GPU prices hit stratospheric levels but, as the market has rebalanced, things are finally beginning to settle down.