The 280X is a 7970, so no point selling your card if your 7950 is already performing at that level and replacing it with the 280X.

The 290X however is a steal. Titan-like performance for half the price, what more could you want? :)

Whether the 290X comes down in price is actually, completely up to nVidia, at-least initially, if nVidia does massive price cuts, AMD will have to respond in kind, that's great news for us. - However buying cards just after a launch is always more expensive than a couple months down the road.

All said and done though, these are high-end pieces of kit, I wouldn't recommend such a card unless you are running a 1080P 120/144hz panel or 1440P and beyond, you would literally be wasting money unless you are using the hardware for tasks other than gaming of course.

As for coolers. I water cool, so noise is never a factor in my purchase decisions, however you can still buy an aftermarket air cooler if noise is a concern and bolt it to whatever reference card you buy now.

Nah. They could use the 290X if they wanted.
What would happen however is that the chips used would have to be binned for the lowest possible leakage so they could get away with the lowest possible voltages to fit inside the TDP target.
Plus they could lower the clockspeeds too, which would be similar to how the Radeon 6990 played out.

If they have to lower the clock speeds and carefully choose the viable chips, it would be easier (and probably with the same result) to use the chips for the 290, don't you think?

But I wonder how it would be called. R9-299X? Or R10-290?

R9-290X2

I don't like it .

It reminds me of Nvidia.

With AMD’s Radeon R9 290X card fully reviewed, detailed and available from last Thursday the PC tech leak and rumour mill turned with determination towards the non-X variant of the graphics card this weekend. According to an AMD Account Manager in China we should see reviews and the full specifications of the Radeon R9 290 revealed on Halloween (Thursday). We saw the hardware spec of the Radeon R9 290 from a Japanese retailer leak earlier in the month. Leaks in recent days have expanded the information publically available on this new Radeon by including various benchmarks, photos of AMD partner made graphics cards and pricing indications.

AMD Radeon R9 290 benchmarks

The Chinese ChipHell forum is packed with news, pictures and benchmarks of the AMD Radeon R9 290. On this forum we can see pictures of a 3DMark 11 and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme score for a system using an AMD Radeon R9 290 achieving X4138 and 4536. The same system packing an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 scored X4252 and 4132 respectively.

There are more benchmarks available from a site called DarkLord (via WCCF) which compares the AMD Radeon R9 290 with both the AMD Radeon R9 290X and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780. Have a look at that below, on the right:

As well as these benchmarks it is open to speculation whether OverClockers.co.uk has already listed AMD Radeon R9 R290 benchmarks in its forums - blurred out as “NDA OC” and “NDA Std” for overclocked and standard cards... There’s an example of the Heaven 3.0 1440P benchmark slide below. Only this and 3DMark are published.

Radeon R9 290 hardware pictures and price indication

A nice selection of pictures featuring a Sapphire branded AMD Radeon R9 R290 was published on ChipHell today. I’ve included a selection of these littered around this article but there are more at the source if you wish to gander.

Finally, what kind of money will you have to fork out to get your hands on AMD’s upcoming slightly snipped GPU featuring 256 less stream processors and an engine running 53 MHz less fast than the top of the range Radeon R9 R290X? TechPowerUp says the Radeon R9 R290 price will be a full $100 less than the Radeon R9 R290X, coming in at $449.

With the launch of AMD’s new flagship Radeon R9 290X only a couple of days behind us, NVIDIA has wasted surprisingly little time in responding the latest salvo in the unending GPU wars. Intended to coincide with the launch of NVIDIA’s holiday GeForce game bundle, the launch of ShadowPlay (more on that later today), and the final (non-beta) release of GameStream, NVIDIA has rounded out their Monday by announcing a pair of price cuts for their high-end consumer video cards, and set a launch date and a launch price for their recently announced GTX 780 Ti.

First and foremost, both GeForce GTX 780 and GeForce GTX 770 are getting price cuts, effective tomorrow (October 29^th). GTX 780 will be reduced by $150 to $499, and meanwhile GTX 770 will be getting smaller $70 trim, bringing the price of that card down to $329.

For the GTX 770 this is something of a delayed price cut – AMD launched their competitive Radeon R9 280X just shy of 3 weeks ago – but as the saying goes it’s never too late. Between the two GTX 770 is about 5% faster while 280X has the 3GB memory advantage, so $329 won’t significantly threaten the 280X but it is where we would have expected NVIDIA to place it given their performance advantage.

For the GTX 780 on the other hand, this is a rapid response for NVIDIA, coming just days after the launch of the Radeon R9 290X. The 290X, its $550 price tag, and its superior performance unquestionably left NVIDIA with little choice but to cut prices. But we had not been expecting NVIDA to drop the GTX 780 below $500, even with 290X’s performance advantage. The end result is that now 290X is the more expensive part by 10% (or $50), which coincidentally is also the 290X’s performance advantage. This puts the two cards on equal footing on the price/performance continuum with NVIDIA’s kicker – their superior build quality and cooling performance – remaining. Furthermore we were also able to confirm with NVIDIA that the metal reference cooler will still be available even after the price cut, so alongside the collection of custom designs we’ve seen the high performance reference blower will still be an option for buyers seeking a quiet blower.

Meanwhile, as previously mentioned today’s announcement also coincides with the launch of NVIDIA’s “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played Holiday Bundle with SHIELD” promotion, which for both the GTX 780 and GTX 770 will consist of Assassins’ Creed IV, Batman: Arkham Origins, Splinter Cell: Blacklist, and the $100 SHIELD discount. So on top of NVIDIA’s price cuts they will also be offering an unusually strong bundle in direct opposition to AMD’s price premium 290X Battlefield 4 bundle. The true value/meaningfulness of a bundle will as always ultimately depend on the buyer, but it’s very unusual to see such a significant bundle attached to what’s already a competitively priced card. So come tomorrow when these price cuts hit, NVIDIA is going to be in a very good position to counter 280X and 290X.

Finally, along with the announcement of tomorrow’s price cuts NVIDIA has also announced the launch date for the previously announced GeForce GTX 780 Ti: November 7^th (next Thursday). Furthermore NVIDIA has also announced that it will be priced at $699, placing it $200 above the GTX 780 and $150 above the 290X. We still don’t have the specs for the GTX 780 Ti, but the fact that NVIDIA is pricing it so far above the 290X indicates that they have a lot of confidence that they will be able to beat 290X’s performance, and will do so by enough of a margin to justify the price. This isn’t wholly unexpected – after all, GTX 780 wasn’t a fully enabled GK110 consumer part – so it should be interesting to see just what NVIDIA has prepared to carry on as their new gamer flagship card.