Igor Wallossek

We have all the makings of a dramatic launch: new high-end hardware, a last-minute delay for more performance, a crazy twist based on retail hardware, and our own home-baked solution to AMD's noise problem. Does Radeon R9 290 impress us or fall short?

Perhaps fortunately, AMD's reference Radeon R9 280X is a bit of a phantom outside our own labs. If you're shopping for one of these Tahiti-based boards, you're looking at third-party solutions. We round up seven models and show what makes them different.

After eight months of watching Nvidia go uncontested in the ultra-high-end graphics market, AMD has a new GPU based on existing technology that promises to challenge the top position. It gets mighty loud at times, but you can't ignore the R9 290X's price.

It's time for the numbers. In addition to testing liquid metal compounds and thermally conductive adhesives, each paste is discussed on its own merits before we chart out the results of four usage cases. After all, these products behave differently.

AMD is introducing a handful of new model names today, based on existing GPUs. Do the company's price adjustments make this introduction newsworthy, or will the excitement need to wait for its upcoming Radeon R9 290 and 290X, based on fresh silicon?

We put 14 professional and seven gaming graphics cards from two generations through a number of workstation, general-purpose computing, and synthetic applications. By the end of our nearly 70 charts, you should know which board is right for your workload.

With its last graphics card introduction until the end of Fall, Nvidia isn't trying to impress anyone with groundbreaking performance. Rather, the company is pulling better-than GeForce GTX 660 Ti-class frame rates to a $250 price point, creating value.

Wait, the new GeForce GTX 770 is powered by Nvidia's old GK104? That's right. And guess what? The card is faster, quieter, more feature-complete, and less expensive than the GeForce GTX 680 that came before it. Can it usurp the compelling Radeon HD 7970?

We've been waiting for this since 2011. AMD is ready to unveil its Radeon HD 7990, featuring a pair of Tahiti graphics processors. Can the dual-slot board capture our hearts with great compute and 3D performance, or does Nvidia walk away with this round?

Corsair already offers a heavy tower case called the Obsidian 800D. Now, the company is one-upping itself with the Obsidian 900D. Is this a genuine high-end enclosure, a bomb shelter, or a mess of sheet metal? We put the case through our bevy of tests.

Lian Li sent us a locomotive chassis that wraps around a PC; it's time for daddy to turn into a boy again. We'll show you how to get the right parts into this case and how to get it mobile. Then, we'll take it to a train museum full of steam-powered tech.

We initially had trouble getting the GeForce GTX Titan to work with OpenCL and CUDA. Finally, though, there are drivers available that fix all of that. Now we can figure out if the Titan makes a good workstation-oriented alternative to Nvidia's Quadros.

Earlier this year, Asus joined the extreme high-end graphics club with its own dual-Tahiti-based card, liquid-cooled and overclocked. You can't buy it anymore, but we got our hands on one and are adding it to our database of performance data.

After a long and lonely reign, Nvidia's GeForce GTX 650 Ti is finally being challenged at the $150 price point. Does AMD's Bonaire-based Radeon HD 7790 offer enough performance to put up a fight, or is its familiar GCN architecture too little, too late?

Today, we look at a card between two worlds. Despite a model number that suggests Pitcairn lineage, this board is based on AMD's Tahiti GPU. Does it behave more like its namesake, or the powerful engine actually under its hood? Read on for more!

Do you think that all power supplies are manufactured by the brand on the label? Think again. We show what makes a good PSU and reveal who builds them. You can actually find lots of quality (instead of just scrap metal) behind some of the budget labels.

NZXT is extending its portfolio of high-end PC cases with a full-size tower called the Phantom 820. After an extended evaluation, it's clear to us that power users played a big part in defining this enclosure's specs. But the story isn't quite so simple.

EVGA recently lent our German lab one of the GeForce GTX 690s we've had in the U.S. for months. The purpose? To pit against HIS' upcoming 7970 X2 and PowerColor's Devil13 HD7990, both dual-Tahiti boards vying to become the world's fastest graphics card.