The freaks come out at night.
Sometimes, at the tail end of a generation of GPUs or CPUs, you see something a little exotic get to retail shelves, perhaps as a way to boost sales of remaining inventory before the shiny new thing wipes the slate clean. Other times, it’s simply a window of opportunity for experimentation. Asus is delivering the Ares III, a Radeon R9 295X designed for custom water cooling and built on a custom PCB. (They’re only making 500 of them, though, so good luck tracking one down.) Now, Sapphire has come along with a 290X that doubles the VRAM allotment from 4GB to 8GB.
If this card looks familiar to you, that’s because we reviewed a very similar Vapor-X unit back in July 2014. It had a Radeon R9 290 GPU, while this one uses the beefier 290X. The 295X2 mentioned earlier technically has 8GB, but it’s a dual-GPU card, so it’s effectively 4GB—VRAM contents in this setup just get mirrored instead of added together. So this new Vapor-X is the first one with this much VRAM dedicated to a single GPU. (We hope you’re taking notes, there will be a quiz in the morning.)
Like the older Vapor-X, this one has a huge 2.5-slot cooler, so you can’t wedge it right next to another one. That makes Crossfire impossible with certain motherboards. Also be aware that this guy is 12-inches long, which may not fit inside some cases. But despite its bulk, the Vapor-X cooler is not tall, so it’s easy to screw the card into its bracket. The pre-installed backplate also helps keep it rigid, and that adds a nice aesthetic flair.
This card also sports three big fans, which work in concert with that giant heatsink to keep the card cool in a way that doesn’t produce the noise we heard from the “reference” version seen at the launch of the 290/290X generation. This 8GB 290X still doesn’t operate as quietly as some other comparable cards we’ve tested, but you’re unlikely to be distracted by it unless you remove the side panel from your case.
What does 8GB of VRAM do for your rig, though? That’s the $64,000 question. If you’re gaming at 1080p, probably not anything. We also couldn’t detect major differences at 2560x1600. In fact, according to GPU-Z, we were just barely using up 4GB of VRAM even when playing at 4K and applying 4x multisample antialiasing in games advertised to use a lot of VRAM (such as Shadow of Mordor with the official HD texture pack installed). Since 4xMSAA is a waste of bandwidth at 4K anyway (options such as SMAA or even 2xMSAA look nearly indistinguishable when screen resolution gets this high), we had trouble figuring out what problem this question solves. Its performance is more or less the same as any third-party 290X that has 4GB of VRAM.
By the time it becomes a good idea to have 8GB, we expect there will be faster video cards on the market. The extra space here may be handy for professionals working with 3D modeling, but those guys are using a different type of card with more highly certified drivers—the kind they need to literally build stuff like bridges, tunnels, and dams. These gaming cards wouldn’t be appropriate for that. Thankfully, the financial hit isn’t as high as you might guess, with this card coming in at $500—not bad, considering all its features. Its performance is within striking distance of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, which was at least $550 as this issue went to press and comes with 4GB of VRAM. TOM MCNAMARA
Specifications
Core Clock - 1,030MHz
Video Memory - 8GB GDDR5
Output - 1x HDMI (with 3D), 1x DisplayPort 1.2, 2x Dual-Link DVI-D
Dimensions (H x D x W) - 1.85 x 4.5 x 12 inches