Power, Temperature and Noise
Here's a surprise. You'd think that Sapphire's overclocked Vapor-X, with 8GB of GDDR5 memory in tow, would consumer more power than a reference Radeon R9 290. That doesn't appear to be the case in our benchmarks, suggesting that AMD's press cards are overvolted. Whatever the reasoning, on a retail card comparison, the AMD R9 290X is thirstier than the GTX 980.
Sapphire's meaty Vapor-X is a capable workhorse. Outfitted with the same collection of heatsinks and fans as the 4GB variant, under-load performance is excellent.
Sapphire can't match the eerie silence exhibited by a number of GTX 980s, yet the Vapor-X remains reasonably quiet when at full tilt. The numbers do it an injustice to some extent - it certainly doesn't sound annoying or loud.