Gigabyte r9 390x review: Gigabyte AMD R9 390X 512 Bit GDDR5 8GB 2xDVI/HDMI/3xDP G1 Gaming Graphics Card GV-R939XG1 GAMING-8GD

4 апреля, 2023

Radeon R9 390X 8GB review

On paper, the task facing AMD’s engineers must have looked formidable. Having jostled for supremacy with Nvidia’s GTX 780 Ti and Titan, the firm was clearly competitive with its Radeon R9 290X — until the arrival of GTX 970 and GTX 980, both of which outperformed the best that the red team had to offer, and did so with bags of overclocking headroom to spare. In producing the Radeon 300 series, AMD had to match or beat Nvidia’s excellent performer — and not only that, it had to do it using existing silicon. We had doubts that it would be possible, but as the benchmarks rolled in, the bottom line became clear: AMD has done it.

It’s a remarkable achievement bearing in mind that all the evidence points towards the R9 390X being little more than an overclocked version of the outgoing 290X. AMD dubs the 300 series version of the chip ‘Grenada’ but really and truly, a straight head-to-head strongly suggests it is the same as the existing Hawaii, simply with a 50MHz overclock — upped still further to 100MHz here in the MSI Gaming version of the card we’re reviewing here. Now, there’ve been overclocked 290Xs before, but none of them have troubled the GTX 980 — something else must have changed to see the impressive performance we’ve looking at here.

That would appear to come down to memory bandwidth. The R9 390X features 6000MHz GDDR5, a 20 per cent improvement in terms of throughput over the 290X (and overclocked still further on this MSI board to 6100MHz) — the result of AMD shifting to a much faster, more capable Hynix memory module. And as a bonus, the firm has decided to double the allocation of VRAM up to a mammoth 8GB. Superfluous? Right now, yes. But in a market where many console ports now require 3GB to service 1080p, who knows what might happen in the months and years to come — especially when cards like the R9 390X are built to service more memory hungry resolutions much higher than the standard full HD?

Of course, there’s just one problem here: heat. AMD’s Hawaii chip is known for its prodigious power consumption and ‘notable’ thermals, a situation not helped by the firm kitting out press with overheating reference designs. But the reality is that add-in board manufacturers like MSI, Sapphire and Asus got a handle on Hawaii within months of release, their refined coolers drastically reducing core temperatures and completely removing performance throttling in the process.

The cooler design we have here on the MSI board is substantial to say the least, with a very meaty heatsink and dual fans — enough, the firm says, to displace 500W worth of heat. On our test bench, with the card exposed to the open air, temperatures never rose about 73 degrees Celsius. It’s an impressive showing — enough for MSI to overclock the already overclocked design — but the fact remains that the power hungry chip is now even more thirsty for juice. The MSI cooler dissipates the heat, but it’s got to go somewhere. The bottom line: ensure your case has great airflow.

Caption

Attribution

  • Order the Radeon R9 390X 8GB from Amazon with free shipping

In terms of physical appearance, aside from the somewhat outsize heatsink, it’s pretty much business as usual for an MSI card. Decked out in the firm’s trademark Gaming Series colours, it’s a good-looking piece of kit and clearly very well built. Power is supplied via a standard six-pin/eight-pin PSU inputs, and ports come in the form of the standard HDMI 1.4a, DisplayPort and dual DVI video outputs. LEDs behind the MSI logo allow for some degree of customisation via a new MSI Gaming app, but we have now reached the point where the majority of aftermarket cooling designs out there do a great job in ensuring that performance throttling isn’t really an issue, even with a chip as meaty as this one.

So, can an overclocked 290X with upgraded memory really take the fight to the GTX 980? Well, as you’ll see in the benchmarks later on, it’s clear that each card has its strengths and weaknesses — something we can address head-on as we dive into our first performance test, our standard Crysis 3 gameplay challenge. The idea here is that we want to run a truly demanding game at its highest settings, and we want to get the best experience by matching both resolution and frame-rate to the display. Usually, we opt for either 1080p or 1440p as our target resolution, but this time we went for both.

There’s a reason for that. Locked to 60fps via v-sync, what immediately becomes clear is that both cards are clearly over-specced for 1080p — only a handful of frames are lost, but GTX 980 has the advantage. However, at 1440p, the situation reverses — neither card can lock at the desired 60fps (you’ll need to drop down to the high setting to do this), but what’s clear is that now the R9 390X is more competitive. It’s slightly faster than its Nvidia equivalent. To cut a long story short: the more pixels you drive, the more AMD’s prodigious memory bandwidth comes to the fore.

In our Crysis 3 gameplay tests, the idea isn’t to run at the absolute fastest frame-rates possible, but rather to synchronise as closely as possible with the display in terms of resolution and refresh — in this case, we’re testing both 1080p and 1440p, the aim being to hit 60fps. We’re using the top-end very high preset, with very high textures, SMAA T2x anti-aliasing and v-sync.

Crysis 3 V-Sync Gameplay R9 390X 1080p GTX 980 1080p R9 390X 1440p GTX 980 1440p
Lowest Frame-Rate 47.0fps 51.0fps 32.0fps 31.0fps
Dropped Frames (from 18650 total) 107 (0.57%) 27 (0.14%) 3270 (17.53%) 3852 (20.66%)

Order the graphics cards tested against the R9 390X from Amazon with free shipping:

  • Radeon R9 290X 4GB
  • GeForce GTX 980 4GB

Moving onto the benchmarks, we find ourselves facing a problem. Comparing against the GTX 980 is a no-brainer — it is the card that AMD targeted in defining the R9 390X’s spec. However, the R9 290X is so much cheaper (while stocks last, of course) and it is built using the same core processor. It’s the next obvious comparison point, but the problem is that AMD has forked its drivers — the 15. 15 300-series driver won’t work with the older card while the existing 15.5 200-series driver doesn’t work on the 390X. This presents a problem as downclocking the 390X to match 290X, we noted some notable differences in performance: Assassin’s Creed Unity, for example. The solution? A hacked 200-series compatible 15.15 driver showed no performance drops on our test titles with the 290X, and suddenly downclocked 390X performance was a match on our test subjects. We’re going to assume that those optimisations will roll out to all AMD users in due course, and that’s the like-for-like comparison we’re going to go with for this piece. [UPDATE 10/7/15 6:51pm: This has now happened — Catalyst 15.7 brings 300 series software optimisations to 200 series cards like the 290X.]

And kicking off with the 1080p analysis, it looks like business as usual for Nvidia, beating the 390X on seven of our nine test titles — the outliers being the usual suspects: the AMD-friendly Shadow of Mordor and Ryse, both significantly faster than the GTX 980. Aside from Crysis 3 and Far Cry 4, which are only moderately faster on the Nvidia hardware, five titles are over 10 per cent swifter on GTX 980. Meanwhile, as expected, the R9 390X is clearly faster than its predecessor, averaging out at an 11.3 per cent speed bump, with only Call of Duty Advanced Warfare disappointing here. In our test sequence, the 390X is only 3.4 per cent faster — clearly the game isn’t so reliant on memory bandwidth.

The takeaway here is that while the GTX 980 and R9 390X might be overkill for 1080p, full HD remains the most popular resolution when it comes to gaming displays. If you’re looking for a very fast card for this pixel count, the GTX 980 remains the default choice — but let’s not forget that the R9 390X is £50 cheaper, and that its wide memory interface shows progressively higher performance the higher the pixel-count you throw at it.

At 1080p, the GTX 980 commands a clear lead over the older R9 290X, but its replacement puts up much more in the way of competition.

1920×1080 (1080p) R9 390X GTX 980 R9 290X
The Witcher 3, Ultra, HairWorks Off, Custom AA 57.4 65.8 50.5
Battlefield 4, Ultra, 4x MSAA 78.3 86.5 69.0
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA 80.1 81.5 69.7
Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA 56.0 62.4 50.0
Far Cry 4, Ultra, SMAA 82.4 87.4 75.0
COD Advanced Warfare, Extra, FSMAA 112.3 128.1 108.6
Ryse: Son of Rome, High, SMAA 81.8 76.1 74.5
Shadow of Mordor, Ultra, High Textures, FXAA 101.9 91.7 89. 4
Tomb Raider, Ultimate, FXAA 107.1 118.2 97.9

GTX 980’s dominance recedes at 1440p — the card still beats the new AMD offering handily on the Witcher 3, but its other wins probably won’t impact the gameplay experience to the same degree — Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4 and Advanced Warfare are all less than four per cent faster in our tests, while a just a single frame separates the two cards on Tomb Raider. We are swiftly approaching the margin of error, and factoring in the R9 390X’s cheaper price and its higher RAM allocation, the card is looking more enticing — especially as it outperforms the GTX 980 in several of our test titles.

The R9 390X has its own marginal win — Crysis 3 being 4.6 per cent faster — but the likes of Far Cry 4 and Shadow of Mordor are almost 13 per cent swifter, while Ryse has a significant 15 per cent advantage. The common denominator here with those three titles is their console heritage, and we know that with Ryse in particular, its compute-heavy engine design favours AMD hardware. It was optimised for the consoles’ GCN hardware, and the PC equivalent benefits as a consequence.

Meanwhile, the higher pixel count also sees the differential with 290X rise too — we’re up a couple of percentage points, with our MSI 390X averaging out as 13.4 per cent faster. A couple of points of interest here: Advanced Warfare continues to scale poorly (it’s at just 6.8 per cent here), but on the flipside, the R9 390X is a whopping 20 per cent faster on Far Cry 4 in our test sequence. Clearly it thrives on memory bandwidth.

As we scale up resolution, the R9 390X begins to make more of an impression, taking the fight to its Nvidia rival.

2560×1440 R9 390X GTX 980 R9 290X
The Witcher 3, Ultra, HairWorks Off, Custom AA 43.5 47.5 38.2
Battlefield 4, Ultra, 4x MSAA 54.5 57.0 47.2
Crysis 3, Very High, SMAA 52. 3 50.0 44.8
Assassin’s Creed Unity, Ultra High, FXAA 38.4 39.7 34.4
Far Cry 4, Ultra, SMAA 69.0 61.3 57.5
COD Advanced Warfare, Extra, FSMAA 94.7 98.2 88.7
Ryse: Son of Rome, High, SMAA 62.2 54.1 55.9
Shadow of Mordor, Ultra, High Textures, FXAA 74.4 66.0 65.9
Tomb Raider, Ultimate, FXAA 75.7 76.7 67.2

With our 4K testing, we acknowledge that running at max settings is going to be a recipe for disaster — and to be frank, it still is, even if you’re running a Titan X — so we opt instead to knock down settings to a more reasonable level, usually just one ‘notch’ down from the max. In the case of all titles — except Assassin’s Creed Unity and The Witcher 3 — this keeps our frame-rate averages above the 30fps that we consider essential for playable action. Not surprisingly, ramping up resolution still further brings the advantages of the 390X to the fore.

Nvidia’s GTX 980 has just one win here — Battlefield 4 is around five per cent faster, but otherwise it’s a clean sweep for the R9 390X. Titles like The Witcher 3, Crysis 3 and Advanced Warfare aren’t that much faster, but AMD mainstays Ryse, Shadow of Mordor and Far Cry 4 open up an even more commanding lead over GTX 980 than they did at 1440p. They’re anything between 18 to 23 per cent faster, and that’s highly significant at this resolution. Meanwhile, the aggregate advantage over the older 290X is still in the 13 to 14 per cent range.

The question is, can the R9 390X really be considered capable enough for 4K gameplay? Our take on it is that the new uber-cards — GTX 980 Ti, Titan X and Radeon Fury X — are still the minimum ‘go to’ hardware for that kind of sheer pixel density. At the 390X and GTX 980 level, you’re going to need to pick and choose your battles — some games can work very nicely, but we consider 60fps gameplay the sweet spot, and we suspect that it’ll require cutting down on a lot of quality presets to get some titles to that standard. Clearly, not every game is as well optimised and as ‘4K ready’ as Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.

At 4K, the R9 390X is at the height of its powers and there are some pretty convincing wins against the GTX 980.

3840×2160 (4K) R9 390X GTX 980 R9 290X
The Witcher 3, High, HairWorks Off, Custom AA 29.1 27.7 26.1
Battlefield 4, High, Post-AA 44.5 46.8 39.6
Crysis 3, High, SMAA 40.2 39.0 36.1
Assassin’s Creed Unity, Very High, FXAA 22.7 21. 8 18.7
Far Cry 4, Very High, SMAA 44.4 36.1 37.4
COD Advanced Warfare, Console Settings, FXAA 76.4 72.0 67.5
Ryse: Son of Rome, Normal, SMAA 37.8 31.5 34.0
Shadow of Mordor, High, High Textures, FXAA 50.1 42.4 44.8
Tomb Raider, Ultra, FXAA 51.4 47.1 45.9

There’s a few points we need to address here before we move on. Firstly, MSI’s card is not a reference-standard 390X. It’s been overclocked, but not to a ridiculous degree — less than five per cent to the core and around 1.5 per cent on the RAM. It’ll make a difference, but it won’t be massively pronounced (overclocking rarely scales in a linear manner in terms of actual performance) and we’d venture to suggest that any 390X on the market could match those clocks with no real effort — all of them seem to come with substantial cooling solutions. Secondly, the GTX 980 we’ve benched here is a reference model, and there’s very few of those on the market. Most GTX 980s should have some kind of minor factory overclock in effect — our Titan X review, which includes an MSI factory overclocked GTX 980 (that unfortunately we don’t have access to any more) gives you some idea of what the boost a factory OC gives you.

Secondly, you might note the lack of overclocking benchmarks here. Part of this is down to timescales (we have a Fury X review we need to be getting on with) but equally, based on initial testing, we can’t really recommend overclocking this card much further than MSI has already taken it. The card ships at 1100MHz and anything beyond 1160MHz on the core causes on-screen artefacting, and the already prodigious power consumption increases still further — on our system, it hit a mammoth 540W during Crysis 3. Even in its factory state, our system managed a peak 499W power draw when combined with our overclocked i7 (our tests below were carried out with the i7 set back to its stock configuration).

The processing capabilities of this card, combined with its 8GB framebuffer may make it sound like a good contender for CrossFire 4K gaming, but the power draw and heat generation from two of these behemoths is going to be immense. Secondly, from a financial perspective, the existing Radeon 295X2 with its supplied closed loop water cooler just makes more sense — even if it will take a performance hit from its slower RAM. The bottom line here is that running two overclocked Hawaii chips in one system really does require some kind of water-cooling solution, and in the 295X2, there’s a robust, ready-made solution that costs much, much less than two R9 390Xs.

Previously we used Metro Last Light to compare power performance, but in producing this piece, our Ryse benchmark seems to be considerably more power-intensive, so we re-tested each card using this title.

R9 390X R9 290X GTX 980
Peak System Power Draw 477W 400W 294W

The case for the Radeon R9 390X is crystal clear: it’s significantly cheaper than the GTX 980, it has twice the amount of on-board GDDR5, and following the upclock and RAM revision, it is comparable from a performance perspective — as long as you’re not a 1080p gamer, where the GTX 980 clearly remains the best choice. However, if your display operates at 1440p or an even higher resolution, the performance credentials of the card bring it into line with the competition, surpassing the GTX 980 in several of our test games.

The case against is equally clear: there’s little overclocking headroom left, and the 390X’s power consumption is quite staggering. But let’s be clear: a power-hungry card doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a nuisance from a noise perspective: in fact, MSI’s cooler here is quite remarkable in terms of both it lack of noise and thermal dissipation. However, the fact remains that a lot of heat is being pumped into your case and you’ll need to ensure that your chassis is capable of expelling it effectively — and the room will definitely get noticeably warmer as a consequence! Additionally, we find the 390X hard to recommend for multi-GPU scenarios, whereas Nvidia’s GTX 970 and 980 both perform well here thanks to their enviable power efficiency, plus better driver support.

Overall, there’s perhaps a sense that AMD has dragged the 290X kicking and screaming into a performance envelope comparable with GTX 980 but in the final analysis, there’s no denying that AMD has achieved what it set out to do: R9 390X offers a gameplay experience similar to its Nvidia counterpart, though the decent overclocking of the GTX 980 may well give the green team final bragging rights.

But it’s the practical value of the R9 390X’s 8GB of GDDR5 that remains something of a mystery. Actual use-case scenarios beyond 4GB are limited right now, and the decision to kit out 390X with twice the memory of the new Fury X flagship is curious to say the least. But what’s clear is that games’ appetite for VRAM is only going to move in one direction, and as developers have been telling us for years now, the more GPU memory you have, the better — and in R9 390X, it’s kind of reassuring just to know that it’s there.

AMD Radeon R9 390X Review

Verdict

Pros

  • Sneaks ahead of GTX 980 for performance
  • Cheaper than Nvidia rival
  • Board partner versions available

Cons

  • Nvidia card is barely slower
  • High power consumption
  • GTX 980 has more versatile architecture

Key Specifications

  • Review Price: £330. 00
  • 1,050MHz core clock
  • 8GB 6,000MHz GDDR5 memory
  • 6.2 billion transistors
  • 2,816 stream processors
  • requires one eight-pin and one six-pin power connector
  • Manufacturer: AMD

What is the AMD Radeon R9 390X?

The Radeon R9 390X is a new high-end card from AMD. Carefully positioned in the market, its £330 price marks it out as a top-tier chip. However, it isn’t as expensive as the hyper-powerful Fury X and GTX 980 Ti, which means it’s within reach of many more gamers.

The R9 390X is built using older hardware that’s been upgraded, and is designed to take on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 – one of the most popular cards around.

AMD Radeon R9 390X – Under the Hood

The R9 390X has the nomenclature of the firm’s previous flagships, but the release of the Fury X means this is no longer a range-topping GPU. That means AMD is content to fill the card with older hardware. The 390X uses the Graphics Core Next architecture that’s been inside AMD cards since 2011, and the Hawaii core that formed the R9 290X has been tweaked and renamed Grenada to build the R9 390X.

The R9 390X still has a whopping 2,816 stream processors. They’re split into compute units with 64 individual processors inside, and 11 of these compute units sit inside four Shader Engines that create the core. There’s a Graphics Command Processor above the lot, giving orders, and a shared L2 cache.

AMD has delivered performance improvements by tweaking certain parts of the core. Thermal benefits mean the core clock can be improved from 1,000MHz to 1,050MHz. The card’s TDP has dropped from 290W to 275W.

There’s no sign of the innovative High Bandwidth Memory that AMD debuted in the Fury X, but the R9 390X still has 8GB of GDDR5 – twice as much as the R9 290X. It’s clocked at 6,000MHz, which is faster than the older card, and it delivers a total bandwidth figure of 384GB/sec. This is higher than the 290X’s 320GB/sec, and even further ahead of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980’s 224GB/sec figure.

The R9 390X has 6.2 billion transistors and retains a 28nm manufacturing process, and the entire card churns out a peak bandwidth of 5,914 GFLOPs – almost 300 GFLOPs more than the R9 290X could manage.

The R9 390X lines up against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 980, which is around £50 more expensive. Nvidia’s card only has 2,048 stream processors, but the core is clocked to 1,126MHz and can rise by 100MHz using GPU boost. The Nvidia card includes half as much memory and a lower bandwidth of 224GB/sec, and its bandwidth of 4,612 GFLOPs is lower on paper.

However, it does fight back in power consumption. The Maxwell architecture is far more efficient than AMD’s hardware, and the GTX 980’s 165W TDP is much lower.

AMD’s card is configured with HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2a ports. That’ll be fine for most uses, but it does come with a couple of caveats. That HDMI connection can’t carry a 4K signal at 60Hz, so you’ll have to use the DisplayPort plug – and HDMI 1.4a also can’t handle as many audio channels as more modern connectors.

The R9 390X is a big GPU that requires at least single eight- and six-pin power connectors, although some third-party cards maybe in need of a bit more grunt; our sample needed two eight-pin plugs. The card we tested also had three fans, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for noise. But AMD does include a new feature that turns off the fans at low load, so the card will be quiet when you’re not playing games.

In terms of APIs, support for all of the usual protocols is included: Mantle, Vulcan, DirectX 12 and more.

AMD Radeon R9 390X – Results Analysis

The R9 390X and its main rival, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980, traded blows in most of our benchmarks – it’s one of the closest graphics battles we’ve seen in some time.

Our first bechmark, 3DMark, is a theoretical test of a GPU’s grunt, and the two cards exchanged victories straight out of the blocks. The AMD hardware was better at 1080p, fell behind at 2,560 x 1,440, and then took a lead at 4K by a handful of points.

The close competition continued in Battlefield 4. The R9 390X’s 1080p average of 81fps was five frames behind the GTX 980, but the AMD card was one frame ahead at 1440p – and then maintained its single-frame lead at 4K. That said, its 29fps average at 3,840 x 2,160 isn’t quite smooth enough to be considered playable, especially with a minimum frame rate of 23fps.

In Batman, the R9 390X was consistently behind the Nvidia card, and the AMD chip didn’t impress in BioShock either – its 114fps average was seven frames quicker at 1080p, but the R9 390X was only two frames ahead at 1440p and slower than Nvidia at 4K.

AMD’s card pulled its finger out when we loaded Crysis – a far more demanding title than Batman and BioShock. It was better at all three resolutions, with its best score coming at 1440p: an average of 54fps is eight frames behind the GTX 980.

The R9 390X continued to perform well in Metro: Last Light and Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. It was faster in every test, with consistent gaps at 1080p and 1440p and led by a couple of frames when we cranked up the resolution to 4K. It was better than the GTX 980 in Tomb Raider, too, with a 7fps lead at 1440p and 4fps at 4K.

Grand Theft Auto V is our last games test, and here the R9 390X fell behind – it was eight frames behind at 1440p and two frames back at 4K.

The last theoretical test, Unigine, saw the cards resume trading blows. AMD’s hardware was slower at 1080p and 1440p, but better at 4K.

It’s an impressive showing for the AMD card, but it’s not all good news. The Graphics Core Next architecture doesn’t have a reputation for being the most efficient, and it falls further behind Nvidia’s Maxwell designs. The R9 390X rig’s top power draw of 410W is far higher than the GTX 980’s 273W – and it’s even more than the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X required. And, in a disappointing show, it even needs more power than the Fury X, which was more efficient and helped our test rig draw 369W from the mains.

That’s no good for your electricity bill, but it also means overclocking isn’t as impressive on this GPU. In addition, third-party manufacturers may struggle to keep down noise levels, since it will require more heftier cooling gear.

The R9 390X is cheaper than its rival from Nvidia, but it does an excellent job in keeping up with the GTX 980. Overall, the AMD card does better than Nvidia in five games, and loses out in only three titles. At 1440p, it’s faster than the GTX 980 in six of our eight test titles.

Outside of that bubble, the R9 390X continues to impress. It’s overkill for 1080p, but it has ample power for playing games at 1440p, and it has enough grunt to handle most games at 4K too. However, top titles will need graphical settings toned down before they run smoothly, because their average frame rates are hindered by poorer minimums.

AMD Radeon R9 390X – Other Things to Consider

The Fury X wasn’t available with board partner modifications. However, the R9 390X is a more conventional card that’s ripe for tweaking so there are plenty of options available if you want something a bit different.

Prices start at under £330, but at this end of the market cards don’t tend to have any overclocking or extra cooling features.

Tweaked versions of the R9 390X are available from MSI, Gigabyte, XFX and Sapphire. Priced between £340 and £350, all are overclocked with cores that run between 1,055MHz and 1,100MHz and memory improved to 6,100MHz.

Some pricier versions of the card have different tweaks. Asus sells a £359 model that retains the stock speed, but adds the DirectCU II cooling gea. Gigabyte and Asus feature modest core overclocks.

With regards to board partners, the R9 390X offers an improvement from the Fury X, but it still can’t compete with the wealth of GTX 980 options available. Cards are more expensive, with prices from £379, but far more plentiful. Splash more cash and you can benefit from bigger overclocks, too; an MSI model that costs £402 tweaks the 1,126MHz core to a mammoth 1,216MHz.

No matter the card you want to buy, check its physical stats. Many R9 390X models are long and chunky, requiring both eight- and six-pin power connectors – so make sure your PSU has the correct plugs and your case is roomy enough.

SEE ALSO: Best Games of 2015

Verdict

The R9 390X is designed to take on the GTX 980, and it does an excellent job. It’s almost £50 cheaper than Nvidia’s card and, in many games, it’s a little faster – and in titles where it’s not quite as quick, it’s never far behind. AMD’s clock increases and memory boosts have clearly worked.

It’s more than powerful enough for 1080p and 1440p monitors, and it’s just about capable of 4K gaming too. Many titles will play at their highest settings, and tougher games will still run smoothly at reasonable quality levels.

The R9 390X is competitive in raw performance terms, but it falls behind Nvidia in other areas. It consumes far more power, which has an impact on noise, heat and overclocking. In addition, there are fewer third-party cards available.

There’s little to choose between the two cards in benchmarks, with the R9 390X only just edging ahead of the GTX 980.

The gaps aren’t wide enough to make a significant difference in what resolutions and quality levels are viable, but the AMD card is the best option if you’re searching for the best speed without hopping up to the next tier of GPUs.

Nvidia’s card, meanwhile, remains a more balanced option thanks to its lower power consumption and more versatile architecture.

Review and testing of the video card Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming: amazing is near

Table of contents

  • Introduction
  • Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming
    • Packaging and delivery
    • Appearance and dimensions
    • Cooling system
    • PCB
  • Test stand
  • Instrumentation and Test Method
  • Standard frequencies and overclocking
  • Cooling System Potential Study
  • Electricity consumption level
  • Conclusion

Introduction

The announcement of a new video card AMD — Radeon RX 480 has died down. But the new models have not yet saturate the market, and only versions of the reference design are still offered to the attention of buyers.

But what about previous generation solutions with comparable performance that are still relevant? In this segment, the choice is richer, and prices in some cases may be lower. One of these will be discussed.

Thanks to our partner, Regard, we are reviewing the Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming graphics card equipped with the Windforce 2X cooling system. Gigabyte developers do not forget about the G1 Gaming series and timely replenish it with new versions of popular accelerators.

In this case, too, they released a model based on the Grenada GPU (aka modified Hawaii), which in some nuances is radically different from its opponents.

recommendations

Review Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming

Full name: Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 390 Gaming [GV-R939G1 Gaming-8GD], manufacturer code: GV-R939G1 Gaming-8GD.

Packing and delivery

The Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming comes in a huge box with branded black and blue printing. The information content of the front side is minimal, there is only the name of the model, the characteristics of the video card and the mention of factory overclocking.

On the reverse side, everything is exactly the opposite: the developers told about all the features of the product in great detail, with illustrations and captions.

Enough said about the cooling system — fans with a new design of the blades, lighting, «backplate», «0dB Fan» mode. For the rest of the components, the use of a high-quality element base is declared, as well as support for the Guru II OC utility.

Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming is protected by soft material that takes up half of the box. Such care of the company is encouraging, but is reflected in the dimensions of the package, which becomes less transportable.

You can play hide and seek and try to find where the developers hid the package. Let’s say, it is located in the lower section under the video card, it includes a user manual and a driver disk.

Modest, but in modern realities it is difficult to expect more.

Appearance and dimensions

When you first meet the Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming, it’s hard to imagine that this is one of the hottest and most demanding graphics cards on the Hawaii GPU, requiring an overall cooling system.

It looks more like a Radeon 380(X) and is easier to believe. However, the developers managed to combine Hawaii GPU and compact CO in a single tandem.

By the way, the length of the printed circuit board does not exceed 246 mm, which is less than that of the reference version with its 267 mm, the width is 118 mm, in the case the model will cover two expansion slots. Miracles, and nothing more, but surprises will await us at every turn.

Gigabyte Radeon R9 390 G1 Gaming is based on the Ultra Durable VGA concept and equipped with the original WindForce 2X cooling system. A decorative plastic casing covers the entire board; it has an interesting edging and multiple cutouts around the perimeter. Two 9 are responsible for the active part0 mm fan with company logo.

Let’s note the «backplate» installed on the video card, which is more and more adapted to remove heat from the printed circuit board due to thermal pads.

Surprising rear panel, which resembles those of Nvidia graphics solutions. There are five video outputs in total:

  • One DVI-D;
  • One HDMI;
  • Three DisplayPorts.

The following resolutions are supported:

  • Digital — up to 4096 x 2160;
  • Analog — up to 2048 x 1536.

The additional power supply is built according to the classic «8 + 6» formula, which ensures the power consumption of the video card up to 300 watts. Of course, the calculation is carried out with a certain margin. For ease of use, the latches are deployed and cable management is very convenient.

A signature feature of the Gigabyte G1 Gaming series is the adjustable backlight. On the side is the inscription «Windforce», highlighted in a pleasant blue color. Here it is worth remembering the possibility of stopping the fans in idle mode. When the load decreases, the turntables turn off, the words “Silent” and “Stop” light up on the panel.

Unfortunately, there is no BIOS switch in this case. It’s a pity, but it was useful.