AMD Radeon R9 290X – $329

The AMD Radeon R9 290X is the odd one on this list because it actually came out in 2013 as part of the Hawaii family of graphics cards (290X and 290). These cards, at their time of release, were the latest and greatest things that our industry had seen to date and continued to maintain dominance in sales for quite some time. They eventually forced Nvidia to drop their prices of their GPUs that had already been out and once again gave consumers better performance and value. And the best value was the R9 290 at that time, and it was such a good deal at that time that in our review of the R9 290, we said that it blew the doors off the competition. And that was true, but now that the faster R9 290X is selling for $329, the R9 290 is not as relevant anymore. The great thing about the R9 290X is that because it has a 512-bit bus it is naturally going to perform better at higher resolution tasks and if you intend to run games at a high resolution like 4K, two of these are without a doubt a great deal.