- Date:
- Friday , August 01, 2014
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Share:

SAPPHIRE VAPOR-X R9 290X TRI-X OC Video Card Review
We take a look at the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X TRI-X OC video card which has the highest factory overclock we've ever encountered on any AMD R9 290X video card. This video card is feature rich and very fast. We'll overclock it to the highest GPU clocks we've seen yet on R9 290X and compare it to the competition.
Power
We tested the power utilization at the wall of the entire system. For full load power and temperature testing we used real gaming. The power supply used in testing is a Enermax MaxRevo 1350W. Total system wattage at idle without video card is 90W.
IFC

IFC, Intelligent Fan Control, is technology from SAPPHIRE that let's two of the three fans power down while idle, or below 60c. With this technology enabled the idle wattage is a low 97W system power. The GPU temp is a degree warmer, but the noise is reduced and near silent. With IFC disabled the three fans run at the same speed and the idle wattage goes up to 106W. Temperature is just barely effected at idle.
During full-load nothing is different between IFC on or off. It does not affect wattage or GPU temperature or the automatic fan speed while gaming at full tilt.
Power and Thermal Results

Let's first look at how the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC improves upon the reference AMD Radeon R9 290X video card. The idle and GPU temperatures are a lot better on the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC. The wattage is also impressive at 437W on the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC which is factory overclocked at 1080MHz and 5.64GHz compared to the reference AMD R9 290X at 431W. This shows the custom build and the hardware components used for the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC are much more efficient than the reference AMD R9 290X. VRM temps are better, and the fans can spin at a slower RPM and still stay way cooler on the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC.
Compared to the MSI GTX 780 Ti GAMING the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC uses more wattage at full-load but the temps are almost comparable, with SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC having a slight edge. The SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC is running at a higher voltage than the MSI GTX 780 Ti GAMING as well, which is more impressive for the lower temp on the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC.
When overclocked the SAPPHIRE Vapor-X R9 290X Tri-X OC eats gobs of power. By keeping the fans at 100% the GPU is kept cool enough. Temperature is not holding back this GPU. For those that want to know the GPU ASIC score, GPUz reports 71%.
Remember, between the 1160MHz 1.305v overclock and 1080MHz 1.391v overclock the former pulls 536W and the latter pulls 570W. However, we can run at automatic fan speeds on the former, while a noisy 100% fan speed is needed for 1180MHz at 1.391v.
That brings us to fan noise. At idle, with IFC on, you cannot hear a thing. Even with IFC off at idle the video card is still a quiet video card. If I were putting this in my own gaming system, I'd leave IFC off, and the noise would never be an issue. At full-load the fans are also quiet while on automatic. Though we reached close to 60% fan speeds, these are quiet fans, noise is not an issue. At 100% fan speed though, they are quite loud, but there are no annoying whines, it's just a steady dull fan noise.
