Are retail Radeon R9 290X cards slower than press samples?
 

With the release of the Radeon R9 290 and 290X, AMD upended the high-end graphics market by offering performance competitive with Nvidia's existing products at substantially lower prices. The new Radeons didn't just improve the value proposition, either. The R9 290X captured the overall GPU performance crown, wresting it away from the GeForce GTX 780 and Titan by the slimmest of margins. Such little differences are magnified in the world of high-end graphics, where the spoils—and sales—often go to the victor. After all, if you're forking over something north of 500 bucks for a graphics card, bragging rights are probably involved to some extent.

http://techreport.com/review/25712/a...-press-samples