People recommend the 290 over the 290x for everything because AMD decided to shy away from actually putting their hearts into reducing the power of the 290, so it's got hardly less cores, the same memory, same memory bandwidth, and a slightly lower clock rate, for $100 less (at least, I think it was $100, it was last time I cared)
EDIT: But, the 290 will last you quite some time. Buy it, it's a cheap, powerful GPU, and it's got support for a level of DX JUST released. And, because of the poor stock thermal solution, there's a plethora of aftermarket coolers out there to put on it, in case you didn't notice that already.
EDIT MORE: Wait... what IS your CPU, might I ask? Just a little bit curious, since it wasn't named.
EDIT: But, the 290 will last you quite some time. Buy it, it's a cheap, powerful GPU, and it's got support for a level of DX JUST released. And, because of the poor stock thermal solution, there's a plethora of aftermarket coolers out there to put on it, in case you didn't notice that already.
EDIT MORE: Wait... what IS your CPU, might I ask? Just a little bit curious, since it wasn't named.
in a perfect world we would all be piles of sand with no ability to form coherent bodies of body