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
In this specific situation, the only reason why I'd get a 970 is that games just seem to be smoother and more trouble free on an Nvidia card. Nvidia is gobbling up AAA+ titles and making them all fancy and smooth.
However, the 290X winds hands down on longevity. 3-4 years after being released and it's still trying to put up a fight against Nvidia. The whole DX12/GCN advantage is a plus too.
TBH, I'd actually love to sell off my 290X and get a 980 Ti, but damn.. it's so expensive.. my MSI Lightning 290X costed $350 (new) where the 980Ti costs nearly $900, more than double the price. (In South Africa)
I suspect the 970 has outsold AMD's entire lineup.
Also Rebrandeons are meh too.
Consider 780's... for those who grabbed it a little more than 2 years ago and paid the close to the full tilt price of $650, it's now are sparring with cards costing 65% less. Nvidia has the 3.5Gb as a planned obsolescence. Not saying that if you hadn't grabbed the 970 back a year ago it wasn't a good place, but it won't be 6-8 months when the B-M's will be showing ($300 today) on Dx12 titles will have folks seeing it's time to spend again. If holding to 1080p for more than a year, getting into this class of card is to much cash, while >4Gb will be the bare minimum for 1440p soon enough.
My 18 year olds' are on 1080p; with a 270X (2 years now) and 280 (year ago). While 270x is still doing adequate, what would you say is the right jump to upgrade? All the while realizing in 6-8 months a new FinFET parts for $240 could bouncing all these cards (390/970) down 2 tiers, all the while making 1440p an actual ability.