XFX's R9 290 Double Dissipation is supposed to offer gamers a good combination of affordability and performance. While some may debate the ?affordability? part of that equation due to the present mark-ups for every AMD graphics card, there's no doubt about the gaming potential of these new Radeon GPUs.

There has been some heated debate about how the R9 290X and R9 290 react to the reference design's rampant thermal issues since they tend to throttle core frequencies quite drastically. This leads to reduced performance under load or a bit more overhead provided the heatsink's fan is increased to ear-splitting levels. In short, AMD's PowerTune hates high temperatures. As a result most board partners have moved away from standard coolers and are utilizing their own designs in an effort to tame the extreme heat produced by the Hawaii core and hopefully deliver stable performance. That's exactly what XFX has done with the Double Dissipation edition.