UPDATE 2
According to PCOnline AMD will launch R9 290 series in China on October 24th.
UPDATE 1
After this update I will no longer post anything about the launch date of R9 290X (I’m tired of receiving conflicting information).
Fresh news have just arrived. The launch is probably set for October 18th. We couldn’t confirm the launch date since distributors, manufacturers and reviewers have all slightly different information. So it’s either this date or a date closer to BF4 launch. Take it as you will.
Tweets from AMD Radeon and Roy Taylor accounts seem to confirm it:
ORIGINAL STORY
Guys from Expreview and ZOL decided to share some photos of their newest graphics card — HIS R9 290X.
Radeon R9 290X is pretty much the only R9 series card to feature new GPU in the whole stack. Powered by Hawaii processor with 2816 Stream Processors, 176 TMUs and 64 ROPs the R9 290X will compete with GeForce GTX TITAN, whereas it’s slower brother R9 290 will fight against GTX 780.
The new launch date
My yesterday’s post about the launch date caused a huge misunderstanding on multiple forums. So let me rephrase what I wanted to say and hopefully this will clear things a bit. The R9 290X will not launch tomorrow, instead it will launch around October 24th, while R9 290 should arrive on October 31st (both dates are just rumors, but a very good ones).
I was also told that October 15th, which was an NDA date in the slides leaked by Donanim Haber (and no, we didn’t made that up), was just a milestone, which was later updated by AMD during the GPU 14 event. Apparently they didn’t update it on time and it somehow made its way to the web. So technically it was postponed, but AMD will just say it was never meant to be launched on this date. Instead they will just claim it’s right on track and the schedule has not changed (of course it didn’t, but we never learned the official launch date).
Anyway here are the photos.