R9 290X Reference Design Comparison

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where you recommended the reference design HIS 7970. I'm assuming you've used the HIS R9 290X as well? Just wondering if the strong affinity comes from experience with previous cards or with the 290X in particular.

My affinity comes from experience with HIS in general. We started buying HIS with the 7970 and 7990, and it didn't take long for us to notice that we never had to RMA a single one, while we did have to RMA at least 2-3 cards from the other vendors we've purchased from. Mind you, in the volumes we deal with, 2-3 cards is a rather acceptable failure rate. But zero is just outstanding. So when we moved to the 290X, we strongly preferred HIS when we could find them. After buying hundreds of HIS cards, we've still not had to RMA a single one.

Conversely, the worst brand we've used is VisionTek. We experienced a 75% failure rate with their GPUs. Mind you they were OEM design and not reference design, but we had so many problems with them that I'll never buy from them again. One of the VisionTek GPUs we had was constantly overheating, so we pulled the fans & shroud to inspect the chip. The TIM was haphazardly applied, and the die itself had a deep scratch on top. Not the earmarks of quality by any stretch of the definition.

Interestingly, there appear to be several versions of the XFX 290X Core Edition.

I would imagine they are just different revisions of the same card, but not sure because we don't buy very much from XFX. Usually only if they're the only thing available.