Friday, September 12th 2014
AMD Readies Radeon R9 390X to Take on GeForce GTX 980
It turns out that the big OEM design win liquid cooling solutions maker Asetek was bragging about, is the Radeon R9 390X, and the "undisclosed OEM" AMD. Pictures of a cooler shroud is doing rounds on Chinese tech forums, which reveals something that's similar in design to the Radeon R9 295X2, only designed for single-GPU. The shroud has its fan intake pushed to where it normally is for single-GPU cards; with cutouts for the PCIe power connectors, and a central one, through which liquid cooling tubes pass through.
One can also take a peek at the base-plate of the cooler, which will cool the VRM and memory under the fan's air-flow. The cooler design reveals that AMD wants its reference-design cards to sound quieter "at any cost," even if it means liquid cooling solutions that can be messy with multi-card CrossFire setups, and in systems that already use liquid-cooling for the CPU; and leave it to AIB partners to come up with air-cooled cards, with meatier heatsinks. Other specs of the R9 390X are unknown, as is launch date. It could be based on a member of the "Pirate Islands" family of GPUs, of which the new "Tonga" GPU driving the R9 285 is a part of. A possible codename of AMD's big chip from this family is "Fiji."
Source:
VideoCardz
One can also take a peek at the base-plate of the cooler, which will cool the VRM and memory under the fan's air-flow. The cooler design reveals that AMD wants its reference-design cards to sound quieter "at any cost," even if it means liquid cooling solutions that can be messy with multi-card CrossFire setups, and in systems that already use liquid-cooling for the CPU; and leave it to AIB partners to come up with air-cooled cards, with meatier heatsinks. Other specs of the R9 390X are unknown, as is launch date. It could be based on a member of the "Pirate Islands" family of GPUs, of which the new "Tonga" GPU driving the R9 285 is a part of. A possible codename of AMD's big chip from this family is "Fiji."
112 Comments on AMD Readies Radeon R9 390X to Take on GeForce GTX 980
GTX 980 is roughly a 10% increase over GTX 780 Ti and a 11% increase in over R9-290x. If we are to assume this is true, AMD doesn't need to put a lot into the R9-390x to out perform GTX 980, and the R9-390x may not even be the contender for GTX 980. The new contender for R9-390x, or same tier product, is GTX Titan Black_2/GTX 980 Ti. So R9-380 and 380x will probably act as the equivalent to GTX 980 reference.
If AMD follows the same trend, it's 28nm GPUs will have a 30%-50% increase in the amount of Streaming Processors. GCN 2.1... It will have the same or higher TDP, and a newer cooler to increase heat and reduce temperatures. Clock Speeds will probably boost up to 1100 to 1150 mhz.
Come in March 2015, NVidia will probably have a GTX Titan out, and AMD will have the R9-390x2 out in May.
LOL AMD and NVIDIA are LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK, MUPPETS!
The same is true of Intel and AMD.
The only slack I give them is the benefit of the doubt that manufacturing that involves other companies creates efficiency and visibility issues on what's happening with your products.
The market needs a small and inclusive company that handles every bit of the GPU product from start to finish.