Home » Hardware » Hardware Review » Graphic Cards » MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning Review – In the market of high-end gaming hardware, many gamers believe that bigger is always better and in this case, the MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning brings gaming graphics to an all new high. If there was a definition for the quality it renders, one could say it is aggressively beautiful.

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning, When Lightning Strikes

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning Review

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning

The MSI TriFrozr thermal design has made this version look like a turbocharged street racer just edging out its competition. If the original design exudes an air of elegance and style, this variant exudes brazen power and unrelenting force. It has three cooler fans to dispel any thoughts of heat issues to go with the snazzy design.

Design aside, we took a look under the hood and see what makes it tick. It comes with a memory size of 4096MB GDDR5 to meet the requirements of today’s latest games. It is overclocked out-of-the-box and now sports a core clock speed of 1080MHZ which is an increase from the vanilla edition.

Like most graphics cards based AMD Radeon cards this also comes with Crossfire support. So what does all these numbers mean? It means you will be at the apex of gaming with this graphics card in your rig. To further explore its capabilities, we ran our benchmark tests on the R9 290X Lightning and the numbers were impressive. We also tested it on high intensity games such as Crysis 3 and Thief, what we experienced was nothing short of wondrous.

The game looks extremely smooth and there were no issues while playing both games, as the frame rate from Fraps showed a steady 60fps at maximum settings. After all that, we decided to see how much juice we can squeeze out of it and bring it to its limits by overclocking. The R9 290X Lightning has ample space for power as we brought it all the way to 1200MHz in our overclocking test and it produced a score of 5,425 in 3DMark’s Firestrike Extreme. That was a pretty big leap; a 120MHz leap to be exact. As per usual, it can go further with some more overclocking knowledge and expertise. We find that the card performs silently, only making noticeable noise when we maxed out the fan speed.

Overall, the MSI R9 290X Lightning is a very powerful card that can handle anything you throw at it. While the price may turn some gamers away, the power that comes with it is nonnegotiable and that’s why it is worth the price for the quality it brings.

Pros

  • Twin BIOS
  • TriFrozr Thermal Design
  • Silent
  • Powerful performance

Cons

  • High Price
  • Power hungry

MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning Specifications

  • Chipset: AMD Radeon R9 290X
  • Core Clock: 1,080 MHz
  • Boost clock: 1,200MHz
  • Memory Size: 4,096MB GDDR5
  • Ports: 2x Dual-link DVI-D, 1x DisplayPort 1.2, 1x HDMI 1.4a
  • Price 805 USD

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Name *
Email *
Website