We have gotten confirmation from multiple sources that the R9 290 will be releasing on 31st October. Ie the end of this month. Meanwhile the R9 290X Amd's Flagship Hawaii GPU will be making its debut tomorrow.

R9 290 (Non X) Coming 31st October and R9 290X Coming Tomorrow (24 Oct)

AMD's flagship Hawaii GPU is launching tomorrow and we are super excited. Also co incidentally the embargo for the same will be lifted, giving way to a flood of information about AMD's next gen 'Titan' (excuse the pun).

Basically the R9 290 is the same silicon (Hawaii) and the same fab process (28nm) in a cut down form. The cut down includes a lowe stream processor count, 2,560, and a lower TMU count, 160. The rest of the components on the chip are identical and a mirror image of the R9 290X. Both the R9 290X and R9 290 feature 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, supporting 4 GB of memory. The GPU core is clocked at 946 MHz, and memory at 5.00 GHz, with a decent 320 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

More importantly however due to a leak at Chinese forums, we now have confirmation that the R9 290 will Launch 31st Oct with its bigger brother coming out tomorrow. The AMD launch is basically just a few hours away for the R9 290X. Once the embargo is officially lifted (at release) reviews and benchmarks (legit) this time will show up.

We were happy to see this Hawaii silicon emerge so silently, but it should really have been to expect. AMD has known about the GK-110 chip that powers Titan and the GTX 780  so it has had close to 18 months to prepare a proper response.