Thursday, June 18th 2015
ASUS Tames AMD's Feisty Grenada Silicon, Intros 0 dBA Idle STRIX Graphics Cards
ASUS managed to tame AMD's feisty "Grenada" silicon, which powers the Radeon R9 390 and Radeon R9 390X, by announcing two high-end graphics cards based on its new triple-fan STRIX DirectCU 3 cooling solution. The cooler turns its fans off when the GPU is idling (common desktop / light-3D loads), and begins to spool up only under heavy 3D loads. The company claims that this will be the quietest R9 390 series cards you can buy.
The STRIX DirectCU 3 cooler is the same as the one pictured cooling the GeForce GTX 980 Ti STRIX, which we spotted at Computex. It features a huge monolithic aluminium fin-stack heatsink, to which heat drawn from the GPU is fed by four 10 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes. This heatsink is ventilated by three 100 mm spinners. This heatsink has contact bases even over the card's 8-phase VRM, and a base-plate that draws heat from its 16 GDDR5 memory chips, that make up 8 GB. The R9 390 STRIX offers factory OC of 1050 MHz (vs. 1000 MHz reference); while the R9 390X STRIX offers 1070 MHz (vs. 1050 MHz reference). The memory ticks at 6.00 GHz on both cards. ASUS didn't announce pricing.
The STRIX DirectCU 3 cooler is the same as the one pictured cooling the GeForce GTX 980 Ti STRIX, which we spotted at Computex. It features a huge monolithic aluminium fin-stack heatsink, to which heat drawn from the GPU is fed by four 10 mm thick nickel-plated copper heat pipes. This heatsink is ventilated by three 100 mm spinners. This heatsink has contact bases even over the card's 8-phase VRM, and a base-plate that draws heat from its 16 GDDR5 memory chips, that make up 8 GB. The R9 390 STRIX offers factory OC of 1050 MHz (vs. 1000 MHz reference); while the R9 390X STRIX offers 1070 MHz (vs. 1050 MHz reference). The memory ticks at 6.00 GHz on both cards. ASUS didn't announce pricing.
21 Comments on ASUS Tames AMD's Feisty Grenada Silicon, Intros 0 dBA Idle STRIX Graphics Cards
I'm currently running HD7950 core at 1,2GHz using 1,3V and VRAM at 6 GHz and the card hardly makes much noise and yet the temperature remains below 80°C. If I can pull this off in my office, surely a multibillion company like ASUS or Giagbyte can as well. But they just don't bother doing it right.
I just can't get excited about it. Much like I wasn't excited about the 280X cards, or the GTX 770's. Old tech is old tech.
Its still a 290X though. Bring sold at the same price...
I don't applaud the rebrand, but it seems the process has improved at least a decent amount to achieve those numbers. Sadly though I wish we had GCN 1.2 on those cards for the other improvements on that board as well as the power draw. But at least this is a decent step up (Especially considering that's lower power while containing 4 more gb of ram and a higher core clock of 1100mhz on that model). The process matured quite a bit for that improvement.
So really, R9 390X versus GTX 980 is really, R9 290X versus GTX 780ti all over again. Yawn (for both). One caveat, the GTX 980 (GK110 performance rival) draws 171 Watts in your linked review. The 390X draws 258. So 390X equals 980 performance using 50% more power. Is that really an achievement?
And before the light brigade charges in with crap about TDP doesn't matter - AMD themselves are certainly espousing Fiji's power/performance metrics, even more so with their Nano.
No, these cards are dull. Fury is (looking to be) awesome. Even if it is on par with 980ti - I think it's a prestige looking part. 6 more days, then we can talk about 980ti / Fury X battles.
I as well am mostly interested in the Fury more than anything else in the series. However its to see there was some improvements down the line at least instead of just putting a different sticker on a box.
I agree, I think the GTX 980 was aimed to just reduce power (err the whole series) over its last predecessor instead of offer serious improvements in the performance area (Which was reserved for the GTX 980ti/TitanX).
It's fine if people want to be marginally impressed by it but in terms of performance I'd expect nothing less. It performs better with less power than 290X - good. But compared to it's green competitor, it's still a power monster, so in that perspective - no change from 1-2 years ago.
But lest I be branded by the circling red talons - I can't wait for the reviews of Fury X. I want to see it perform better than GM200. I want to know it's noise (pump/fan) and it's gaming pedigree. I hope for AMD's sake it's a game changer (it already is with HBM) but really - a shot in the arse for Nvidia would be good.
HardOCP's power consumption figuresare at odd's with Hilbert's also
Edit: Ok just looking at W1zzard numbers there no way they have any claim to that lower TDP...