Spotted: 8 GB XFX Radeon R9 290X Graphics Card
XFX is also building an 8 GB variant of its R9 290X graphics card.
An inside source at AMD recently told us that it has allowed its AIB partners to start manufacturing and selling 8 GB variants of the R9 290X graphics card. At the time, we knew that Sapphire, MSI, and PowerColor were all building their 8 GB cards, and now XFX has joined in.
The news was posted by VideoCardz.com, which shows images of an XFX R9 290X with an 8 GB sticker on it. On the graphics card we see the company's custom "Ghost2" cooler, which is an open-air unit with two fans that push cold air through a dense aluminum fin array. It also has a glowing XFX logo.
Aside from the increased frame buffer, the 8 GB R9 290X cards are identical to their 4 GB counterparts. The added memory may not be especially useful when it comes to Full HD gaming on a single display, but for 4K gaming, there will be situations where the 8 GB will help performance, especially in multi-card configurations.
We'd like to try to estimate how much the 8 GB cards will cost, but unfortunately, that's rather difficult. 4 GB Radeon R9 290X prices are now all over the place, with recent promotions bringing them down to as low as $330. 8 GB cards have already hit a retailer over in the UK, though it remains unsure when, if ever, the 8 GB cards will actually be coming to the U.S.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
-
blenderbros1 this is something i could put my hands on, i allways loved xfx cooler designs for some odd reasonReply -
ubercake One thing AMD is consistently great at is adding a bunch of VRAM to their high-end cards.Reply -
Christopher1 ReplyOne thing AMD is consistently great at is adding a bunch of VRAM to their high-end cards.
Yes, but that is kinda spoiling the game companies who are assuming that every single gamer is going to have a card with these massive amounts of VRAM on it.
Sorry but I cannot afford the cost of a laptop that has an NVidia graphics processor in it and this much memory, it comes to about 2K-3K once you are done configuring, touching nothing but the graphics card.
-
Alter-iGo This is move is relevant just as putting 2GB on NV GF740/730 or AMD R5 card.Reply
you will see no FPS gain out of it, except MAYBE extreme setups like 3*4K with more then 2 cards in SLI/CFX. How many people have this setup?...
The facts that games will load maps to memory as much as they can doesn't contribute to batter gameplay.
http://and the page after. This is from guru3d COD-Advance Warfare graphics performance benchmark.
==>NO correlation between memory use to FPS.