I did some further tweaking to see what kind of speed I could safely get out of a single r9 290.  So far it isn't too bad.  I had to run a bit slow for a couple hours, and thought I would just see about pushing it to make up for lost time. 

taking my avg stats over the last 50 mins (since I started tweaking the settings for speed, I am turning up an avg rate of 111.8%.  The actual interesting part is my temps.  The gpu is staying at or below 70C, and the vrms are staying at 90C.  The power usage is 209.7W.  So, a 16% increase over stock settings with only 8 W more power usage. 

It will be interesting to see what I get from the 290x when it arrives.