At a Glance
(+) Muscle Cars
Lots of memory; high performance; good price; reasonably quiet.
(-) Muscle Heads
Power hungry; weak factory overclock; requires a big case.
Sometimes you have to admire the power cars of the world. Forget being environmentally friendly and efficient: we want all the power you can give us and we want it now! That’s apparently the thinking behind Sapphire’s latest graphics card, as it takes AMD’s new R9 390X—which is really just a rebranded version of the R9 290X but with 8GB GDDR5 memory—and gives you three fans to keep the power hungry GPU cool. Sapphire is clearly intending users to overclock the card as well, as it includes two 8-pin PCIe power connections; combined with the x16 motherboard slot the card has access to a staggering 375W of power. Without some form of exotic cooling, however, the GPU will top out long before it uses that much power.
AMD’s suggested pricing on the new R9 390X is $429, but with the Tri-X cooling you’d expect to pay a slight premium, and you do. Currently, the Tri-X 390X is listed at $449 on Newegg, though this early in the game it’s difficult to say where prices will actually settle. You’re definitely not paying for the factory overclock, though, as Sapphire has only bumped speeds by 5MHz over the standard 1050MHz clock. Why even bother at that point? Anyway, we were able to goose things and managed a stable 10 percent (105MHz) core overclock. The memory is already running 20 percent faster than the 290X, so for most games there’s no need to push the GDDR5 any farther, but we were able to run stable at 1600MHz. The results from overclock are a consistent 5–10 percent improvement to performance, but power draw under load is increase by more than 10 percent.
This is our first chance to take the new R9 390X out for a spin, so we’re going to be pitting the Sapphire Tri-X against some of the other top performing GPUs, including the new GTX 980 Ti along with the GTX 980, GTX 970, and R9 290X; we’ll even toss in an old GTX 770 for those wondering how the previous generation of hardware fares. AMD’s goal is clearly to take on the GTX 980, and with the increased clock speeds they’re able to go toe to toe with Nvidia. Who wins depends as much on the game of choice and settings as much as anything, with the Tri-X winning in several titles but trailing in others.
The usual suspects favor AMD and Nvidia cards, with the notable exception of Batman: Arkham Origins. Previously an Nvidia ruled title, the latest drivers and hardware from AMD give the 390X an edge over 980. The 390X also holds onto a moderate lead in Hitman: Absolution, with a smaller lead in Shadow of Mordor. The GTX 980 wins the rest of the matchups, with Unigine Heaven, The Witcher 3, and GTAV all favoring Nvidia by 10 percent or more, depending on the resolution.
Of course we’re running at standardized maxed out (or nearly so) settings, and it’s possible to tune each game to run substantially faster without sacrificing too much in the way of image quality—turning off HairWorks in The Witcher 3 for example can provide a serious boost to frame rates. On average, however, Nvidia’s GTX 980 maintains a lead at 1080p and 1440p settings, but the 390X claims a victory at 4K, no doubt thanks to the 8GB memory.
The GTX 980 Ti wins in all the races, but at $200 more than the 390X.
Lost in the woods
The big problem here is that focusing purely on performance is missing the forest for the trees. Yes, AMD’s 18 month old design can still compete with Nvidia’s newer GTX 980, but even after overclocking the GTX 980 is still going to use far less power than the stock R9 390X. And just to be clear, the GTX 980 can typically hit 15–20 percent overclocks, which puts it firmly out of reach of the R9 390X.
As for the Tri-X, Sapphire’s inclusion of two 8-pin connectors is probably more than is strictly necessary, and we only managed 120/100MHz overclocks. Even with only a moderate overclock, we had to boost the fan speeds to keep the card stable, which made the Tri-X pretty loud. It behaves a lot better at stock settings, where it’s much quieter than our old R9 290X blowers. In other words, while the sheer power of a muscle car can really sound impressive, when it gets beat regularly by a smaller car with better handling it loses some of its glamor.
Toss in the fact that we know AMD’s Fury X is coming out next week, with promises of the standard Fury and the Fury Nano due later this summer. Even AMD knows R9 390X is a stop-gap solution, as they’re already bragging how the Fury Nano will deliver twice the performance per watt as the R9 290X. So if you haven’t already purchased an R9 290X, this is a tough sell, even with twice the memory.
From a performance standpoint at stock speeds, the 390X is a slightly better card than the GTX 980 for 4K gaming, and it costs less as a bonus, but if you’re really serious about 4K gaming you should look at the GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Yes, it costs 40 percent more, but it also delivers 25 percent better performance, which is pretty impressive scaling at the top of the performance pile. And if you simply don’t want to play for team green, we still recommend waiting to see what the Fury X brings to the table.
Follow Jarred on Twitter
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1L2pa9h
