Radeon R9 290 or Saphire R9 280x toxic?

Sorry I didn't respond sooner, was at work all day. Glad you found a solution you are satisfied with. The R9 280x should have no problems tackling just about everything you can toss at it in 1080p. Putting the difference in price toward another part which will improve performance of your machine is likely to benefit you more than the bigger graphics card would have, also. The benefit of a fast drive for your OS will be felt well beyond mere gaming.

In all honesty though, most graphics cards will poop out between 95°C - 105°C. I suspect the biggest reason for the R9 290 and 290x's bad rep (if it even exists) seems to be from the reviewer on Tom's Hardware insisting on running the card with as slow a fan speed as possible. At least the reviewer was up front about it, from my perspective. He said he wanted the card to run quietly, which is fine, but it tells us any heat issues he comes across are due to his personal choice, not a fault of the card. The card is no different than any other graphics card, except AMD tried to tailor the running of the card toward acoustics, rather than performance, so the GPU clock will lower to reduce temperature, rather than the fan speed increasing to dissipate greater heat. (Intel's processors do the same thing if they detect they are headed towards a meltdown.) If you allow the fan to run at a sufficient speed, the GPU clock isn't going to lower, as you will be expelling the heat generated. The same is true for your 280x, that if you hobbled the fan speed, it too would overheat. Nothing magical or scary about it, just some silliness Tom's managed to drum up a bit of buzz with.

As for the noise generated, since the reference cooler has not changed much between the R9 280x and the R9 290, you will have an increase in noise generated which should be quite proportional to the increase in temperature generated, due to the increase in graphics work being done. The underlying architecture has not really changed significantly, as AMD just made a bigger version of the core used in the 280x by adding another 512 shaders and their accompanying accoutrements.

Honestly I would have just bought a titan because AMD is the suck...

nope JK

I'm actually about to purchase a beautiful R9 290 and grab an Arctic Accelero I've seen benchmarks where they outperform the 290x with that aftermarket cooler on them, think about the performance you could get out of the 290x if you had enough to drop $625 on it...