Monday, December 14th 2015
AMD Readies 4 GB Variant of the Radeon R9 390
In a bid to step up the pressure on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and the product-stack below it, AMD is getting its add-in board (AIB) graphics card partners to launch cost-effective variants of the Radeon R9 390, with 4 GB of memory, instead of the 8 GB that was standard to the SKU. These cards feature 4 GB of memory across the chip's 512-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, and could help AMD and its partners shave a few dozen Dollars off the standard version, which is currently selling for as low as $309.
4 GB of memory would make the R9 390 a complete re-brand of the R9 290, if not for its clock speeds. The custom-design variants of the 4 GB R9 390 ship with clock speeds that are 10% higher than those of the R9 290, and the performance was found to be proportionately higher, by Expreview. Of the three cards spotted crawling their way out of product launch pipes in China, the ones from XFX and PowerColor retain the design and packaging of their 8 GB siblings; while Sapphire mated the chip with a new dual-fan cooler with a meaty, split aluminium fin-stack heatsink.
Sources:
VideoCardz, Expreview
4 GB of memory would make the R9 390 a complete re-brand of the R9 290, if not for its clock speeds. The custom-design variants of the 4 GB R9 390 ship with clock speeds that are 10% higher than those of the R9 290, and the performance was found to be proportionately higher, by Expreview. Of the three cards spotted crawling their way out of product launch pipes in China, the ones from XFX and PowerColor retain the design and packaging of their 8 GB siblings; while Sapphire mated the chip with a new dual-fan cooler with a meaty, split aluminium fin-stack heatsink.
37 Comments on AMD Readies 4 GB Variant of the Radeon R9 390
Sure, hawaii is power hungry like mid century European dictators but at least it gets things done, and the coop version is the most powerful card tested at this time, sure it gets curb stomped when CF fails and you end up at the mercy of the AMD driver team, but when the coding monkeys do their job and CF kicks in there are no cards capable of giving the same performance.
Of course, this all depend on AMD actually pricing the card right, if it picks up where the 290 left (250 - 200 usd, working in krone is different) it shuld be a massive hit. But AMD have been pricing stuff not at the optimum price point lately (see furry nano), so fingers crossed, a rebirth of the 290 at 290 prices will be the mid level performance card for the user not that interested in power consumption.
I'd like to see AMD rework there pricing the 380 2Gb $170/ 4Gb $190, 380X 4Gb $220, this 390 4Gb $260/ 8Gb $300, 390X $370
And it took the crown for best seller for an entire year and it's still fighting for places in the top ten list with GTX 980Ti and GTX 960.
Still not sure why they would wait this late in the game...
970 would have been "legendary" had nVidia not screwed their customers by gimping the VRAM. Only reason it still sells is because people don't read and just buy whatever everyone else has bought. 970 should go down as the best way nVidia ever created to get people to buy 980s.
e: typo