PowerColor PCS Plus R9 290 vs Sapphire R9 290 Tri-X

[UndaG]

Which one is better and will i get a bottleneck(probably not but..) with an fx-8350?

 

[Shneiky]

Sapphire hands down. PowerColor is lower tier manufacturer. Also the Tri-X design of Sapphire is one of the best cooling solutions for the R9 290/290X. And no, your CPU won't bottleneck the 290. Cheers and good luck.

 

[UndaG]

Thank you

 

[Jamie506]

Sapphire hands down. PowerColor is lower tier manufacturer. Also the Tri-X design of Sapphire is one of the best cooling solutions for the R9 290/290X. And no, your CPU won't bottleneck the 290. Cheers and good luck.

What evidence do you have that PowerColor is of lower tier then any other vendors? Tri-x is one of the best R9 cooling solutions but Powercolor beats the Tri-X in temperature and benchmarks. (Google a review) I get if you have a love for Sapphire but don't twist fact from fiction and lead someone to a product that may in fact be inferior to the Powercolor.

More expensive doesn't mean better all the time.

 

[Shneiky]

All those dead PowerColor, Zotac, Inno3D, PNY, Palit cards over the years.

Tier 1 manufacturers:
Asus, Gigabyte, Sapphire, XFX, EVGA, MSI

Tier 2 manifacturers:
PowerColor, Zotac, Inno3D, Club3D, HIS, PNY, Palit, Sparkle, Galaxy, Gainward (was in tier 1 back in the 2000 and something),

 

[FG_Regulus]

All those dead PowerColor, Zotac, Inno3D, PNY, Palit cards over the years.

Funny, I've never had a Powercolor card go bad, but my Sapphire card went bad after about a year. I guess that means Powercolor is tier 1 and Sapphire is tier 2, right?

OP - the PCS+ is the best r9 290(x) that you can buy right now. It's spectacular and you should get it. Powercolor is actually one of the best brands for AMD cards as of late. They had some strife in their early years, but they've grown up and now they have really premium cards for almost no price premium. As someone who has owned both of these cards, I have to recommend the PCS+.

 

[Shneiky]

Well you owned 2 of those cards, but more 100 has passed through my hands. My dad does computers for a living, I do them as hobby + I am 3D/VFX generalist so computers are basically my life as well. You can take your 2 cards and compare them to the 20+ Zotacs, around 10ish Sparkle, 5ish PowerColor, 12 Palit dead cards he has in his stock pile. To be perfectly honest, there are 3-4 Asus cards and 2 Sapphire ones. I still have ATI Radeon 7500 (not HD 7750, but the 7500 made more than 10 years ago) and a 9550 from Sapphire still working. And to be completely hones those numbers are that high, because people over there tend to go for the cheaper ones. When a dead card arrives, he just goes and buys a Tier 1 brand. The failure in the 3-5 year span is significantly lower in the Tier 1 brands. PowerColor is not that bad compared to Zotac for example, but is nowhere near Asus and Sapphire or Gigabyte for longevity. Generally neither me, nor my father buy MSI, EVGA, XFX because they are more expensive than Asus for example, due to supply channels, so I can not comment on the general life span.

 

[joselo025]

I would go for the powercolor the sapphire one is overrated

 

[onur_v]

I have had 2 tri-xs and 1 pcs+. The first 290 I bought was one of the tri-xs and when it turned out to be dead I bought the pcs+. Then it turned out to be dead also and at last I had a normal working tri-x. So I think I have right to say something about these cards.
Many people don't have problem with the Sapphire brand but I did twice (7970 and 290 once), yet the cooling performance and noise of tri-x is what I find really satisfactory. But the problem with the tri-x is its vrm temperatures and with some voltage it can surpass the gpu temperatures so you have to check those out when overclocking. So I should say that cooler of pcs+ is better compared to tri-x, but the problem I encountered with the powercolor is that even though the card is clocked higher than reference cards, it has lower 3dmark and unigine scores. I thought this was a special case for my card but a little search revealed that many people had the same problem. Also the cooler works a bit noisy compared to tri-x but it can be justified by the overall 3 degrees lower gpu temps and much better vrm temps (tri-x lacks the needed heat sinks on the vrms as far as I know). But because of the performance difference I returned to sapphire and am happy now, but the choice is yours. Keep in mind that tri-x always comes with hynix memories but pcs+ may or may not. I had hynix on powercolor but it used to caused black screens nevertheless,