Today we’ll take a closer look at the flagship R9 290 card from PowerColor. The full name of the card is PowerColor PCS+ R9 290 4GB GDDR5, with the part number AXR9 290 4GBD5-PPDHE. It uses nicely designed, but oversized three-fan cooler and a custom PCB. The cooler was originally designed to meet the demands of the more powerful R9 290X. We hope this should provide more silence and overclocking headroom for the PCS+ R9 290 card.

Power Color has two R9 290 cards based on a custom design. The TurboDuo R9 290, the slower of the two, is clocked at 975MHz for the GPU, while the PCS+ R9 290’s GPU runs at 1040MHz. Thanks to the custom design, the PCS+ should not have a problem of keeping its GPU clock at the maximum during extended intensive GPU load scenarios.

The R9 290 is based on the 28nm Hawaii GPU with 2560 Stream Processors. The PCS+ R9 290 comes equipped with 4GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1350MHz (5.4GHz effective).

GPUZ confirmed the PCS+ runs at 1040MHz and we can see that the GDDR5 is also factory overclocked from 1250MHz up to 1350MHz. This bumps the bandwidth up to 346GB/s, which is about 10 percent more than you’d get on a reference card, or even a reference 290X for that matter.