Is the Sapphire Tri-x 290x worth the extra $ over a Sapphire Tri-x 290x?

[Bacon Shake]

I am planning on getting 2 of them for crossfire for 1440p and I want to run almost everything maxed or near maxed at 60FPS using at least 2x MSAA.

Upgrading from a GTX 690, it was nice while it lasted but 2GB of vram is killing my system.

I do not want to wait for the upcoming GPUs, I can get these gpus new on a big discount ($700 for 2 Tri-X 290xs, $600 for 2 Tri-X 290s). No Nvidia suggestions! Only Sapphire Tri-X.

My System
CPU: i5 4670k @4.4ghz
Motherboard MSI MPower Max z87
PSU: Corsair AX 750 (I know I won't be able to overclock with it, if I feel like overclocking I will upgrade it)
Ram: 16Gb @1866 CAS 9
OS: Windows 8.1 Professional
SSD: 60GB Vertex 3 (Replacing this with a 256GB 850 Pro within the next week or so)
HDD: 2x 3TB Seagate NAS in Raid 0

The only 290/290x I will buy is a Sapphire Tri-X, the cooler is one of the best available and it is the 2nd closest to matching my motherboard, the first being a lightning which is out of my price range.

 

[Gaidax]

This is easy, I had both R9 290 Tri-X and R9 290X Tri-X.


The clear answer is go for R9 290 Tri-X (clarification: non X) - I ran a benchmark I had on both with my system you can see in signature:

Bioshock Infinite benchmark with AA 4xQ at 1080p and Ultra details including DDOF.

R9 290 Tri-X - 87 FPS average
R9 290X Tri-X - 91 FPS average (+4% difference)

Those are Single Card benches.

In my opinion 4% more performance not worth $100 at all. Besides that - R9 290X Tri-X is actually slightly bigger than R9 290 Tri-X for some reason - it's cooler takes a bit more than 2 slots (like 2 and a bit), so take that into account - it may block a PCI-E slot for you.


How did I have both of those? I bought 290 Tri-X (non-X) first, but it had some random annoying boot issue sometimes which proved to be a faulty card (everything else was working perfectly), so I returned it and got 290X Tri-X instead for extra $. Could have saved that extra money really ><

 

[Bacon Shake]

This is easy, I had both R9 290 Tri-X and R9 290X Tri-X.


The clear answer is go for R9 290 Tri-X (clarification: non X) - I ran a benchmark I had on both with my system you can see in signature:

Bioshock Infinite benchmark with AA 4xQ at 1080p and Ultra details including DDOF.

R9 290 Tri-X - 87 FPS average
R9 290X Tri-X - 91 FPS average (+4% difference)

Those are Single Card benches.

In my opinion 4% more performance not worth $100 at all. Besides that - R9 290X Tri-X is actually slightly bigger than R9 290 Tri-X for some reason - it's cooler takes a bit more than 2 slots (like 2 and a bit), so take that into account - it may block a PCI-E slot for you.


How did I have both of those? I bought 290 Tri-X (non-X) first, but it had some random annoying boot issue sometimes which proved to be a faulty card (everything else was working perfectly), so I returned it and got 290X Tri-X instead for extra $. Could have saved that extra money really ><

Alright, I have been looking at various benchmarks and test and it seems like the 290 will be good enough, the performance gap is even smaller with crossfire at 1440p, most games its only a few FPS.