Since the release of the highly competitive R9 290X, computer enthusiasts have been highly anticipating its little brother, the R9 290. When it comes to GPUs the second tier card is often a lot more popular than the flag ship because it costs a lot less and performs very similar. The R9 290 was scheduled for an October 31 release but that was delayed 5 days to November 5. Reports say the reason for the delay are driver related and perhaps there were bugs or more likely AMD wants a higher performing driver on release day. Reviewers have been asked to retest the with the new driver. The first impression is everything and AMD understandably wants it to be a good one. Very few review sites ever re-review a video card after its release, so AMD's actions do make sense. Another reason AMD might want a better driver is the R9 290 (rumored to be priced at $449) has newly found competition after Nvidia's price cut on the GTX780 ($649 to $499), which I might add was thanks to the amazing performance and very competitive price of the faster $549 R9 290X. The report also states AMD is aiming for GTX780 performance with the R9 290's new driver. Time will tell what happens but if the R9 290X release is anything to go on it should be another competitive GPU from AMD.

 

Update: November 5, 2013

The reviews are in and the card is amazingly priced at $399 and outperforms the GTX780 and nips at the heals of the Titan. It performs very close to even the flag ship R9 290X making it almost pointless to pay $150 extra for it. The purpose of the driver update, that caused the 5 day release delay, was to increase the fan speed from 40% to 47% which causes the card to throttle less when gaming. Reviewers did mention this increase makes the card insanely loud but if you wait for the aftermarket cards with better coolers that should solve that problem. Overall the card is a price/performance king and I applaud AMD for their aggressive pricing on the R9 290X and 290. The official specs are 2560 shaders, 160 TMUs, max core clock of 947MHz (AMD doesn't provide base clock specs and reviewers are giving conflicting info), 4GB GDDR5 at 5GHz, 512-bit memory bus, and 320GB/s memory bandwidth.