Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8 GB

[rtwjunkie]

Techpowerup needs to add Battlefront 2015 to the video card reviews.

Then PM W1zzard and suggest it, since he does the GPU reviews. Putting it here won't get it seen. Don't be surprised if he says no. He likes continuity, and changing games everytime someone wants one doesn't add to credibility of the reviews.

 

[Szb84]

Techpowerup needs to add Battlefront 2015 to the video card reviews.

The only (reasonable) way of Battlefront benchmarks would be to do it in MP matches (or in a similar demanding scenario) - but this is not something that can be (consistently) reproduced...
There is no point to benchmark the game in Missions mode it's not a "realworld scenario", it would only create false expectations...

 

[KIAFA]

You guys think I can run this card with a Corsair TX 650 v2 (made by Seasonic)? I plan to OC.

Ivy i5 4.3GHz @ 1.15v
Z77
8GB DDR3
1 HDD + 1 SSD

 

[Aquinus]

You guys think I can run this card with a Corsair TX 650 v2 (made by Seasonic)? I plan to OC.

Ivy i5 4.3GHz @ 1.15v
Z77
8GB DDR3
1 HDD + 1 SSD

It should be okay. My machine doesn't tend to consume much more than 550-watts for full system load off the wall with my 390 plus everything else in my machine when overclocked. Keep in mind though, these cards don't tend to overclock very far because they've been tuned already.

 

[Deep]

First post here.

Thanks for the great review. Always enjoy Techpowerup's reviews.

Just wanted to throw my 2 cents as a R9 390 Nitro owner. Out of all the R9 390 designs, only the Saphire and XFX are 2-slot designs (my itx case could only fit a 2 slot design). And AFAIK, XFX is the only R9 390 for which you can buy a full cover waterblock.
If I'd have had more room Powercolor would have been my choice, a s it's cooler is as good (=quiet), if not better than Saphire's.

 

[Renatogarou]

970 and 390 are great card, there is no silver bullet between them.

I want a 970 but 390 was more cheaper, so I brouth its.

970 has better software suport and more room for overclock, fact, at least to me.

performance is very similar.

8GB is useless, will never appear a game which to use effectively this 8GB, but and 5Gigas?

If future games run smoothly on card that has only 1GB VRAM more than 4GB, the 390 has it and 970 don't. This game may appear or may not. It could give to the 390 an advantage, but 970 will still runs the same game very well.


(I'm Brazilian, sorry my bad english, I appreciate any help to improve my english)

 

[W1zzard]

Techpowerup needs to add Battlefront 2015 to the video card reviews.

I'm rebenching with new games right now, Battlefront is not one of them. New games: Anno 2205, AC Syndicate, Just Cause 3, Batman Arkham Knight, COD BO3, Fallout 4, Rainbow Six Siege.

 

[nem]

I'm rebenching with new games right now, Battlefront is not one of them. New games: Anno 2205, AC Syndicate, Just Cause 3, Batman Arkham Knight, COD BO3, Fallout 4, Rainbow Six Siege.

hi W1zzard between 390 and 970 witch you will choice if you were the buyer..

 

[Eroticus]

I'm rebenching with new games right now, Battlefront is not one of them. New games: Anno 2205, AC Syndicate, Just Cause 3, Batman Arkham Knight, COD BO3, Fallout 4, Rainbow Six Siege.

You have taste on most not optimized games for PC. battlefront isn't perfect but one of well optimized. =P

 

[Aquinus]

You have taste on most not optimized games for PC. battlefront isn't perfect but one of well optimized. =P

One usually requires a reliable and repeatable method for benchmarking an application in order to do it. Seems that it may not be feasible.

The only (reasonable) way of Battlefront benchmarks would be to do it in MP matches (or in a similar demanding scenario) - but this is not something that can be (consistently) reproduced...
There is no point to benchmark the game in Missions mode it's not a "realworld scenario", it would only create false expectations...

 

[Grings]

First post here.

Thanks for the great review. Always enjoy Techpowerup's reviews.

Just wanted to throw my 2 cents as a R9 390 Nitro owner. Out of all the R9 390 designs, only the Saphire and XFX are 2-slot designs (my itx case could only fit a 2 slot design). And AFAIK, XFX is the only R9 390 for which you can buy a full cover waterblock.
If I'd have had more room Powercolor would have been my choice, a s it's cooler is as good (=quiet), if not better than Saphire's.

The EK 290 waterblock fits the Powercolor card, and a full cover for the msi one is coming soon according to ek's cooling configurator, no plans for this card

 

[medi01]

A side note on WoW:

1) It peaked at about 12 million users quite a while ago, was at 7 million as of Jan 2015, lost 1.5 million, could have recovered a couple after WoD release, but would not get to 10m, no chance
2) Most popular MMORPGs are played in Asia and a number of them is bigger than WoW:
http://mmos.com/editorials/most-popular-mmorpgs-world

 

[nem]

Nice how the 390 out performs to 970..

from pcper.

 

[TheGuruStud]

Wait, so now everyone forgot about frame times and the 970's last .5GB being junk?
Go ahead and play some games using 4.5GB of vram on that 970. Don't bother replying when you get pissed off from the frame stutter.

I have multiple games installed that use over 4GB and I don't have AA cranked up (mostly shitty FXAA). So...that argument about games not using more than 4 is...BS.

 

[Vayra86]

One usually requires a reliable and repeatable method for benchmarking an application in order to do it. Seems that it may not be feasible.

Battlefront benches are pointless anyway, we already have two(!) Frostbite engine games in the bench suite as it is.

Use BF4 for a reference performance benchmark for Battlefront = done.

Stop looking at game titles, start looking at engines.

When I analyze benchmarks/card performance myself, I always look at the main and most demanding engines, not games. So I am always very interested in Crysis 3 (latest CryEngine), Metro LL, BF3 (overclocking), BF4 (latest Frostbite), TW3 (I consider the RED engine a returning engine, it's way too good not to), and one Ubisoft open world thingy (for Dunia).

Also, for absolute performance differences, you can easily determine what it is that strangles a card. For TW3, it's Tesselation which is why Maxwell takes a lead there, which is far stronger at that than Kepler - even w/o Hairworks. FWIW, CryEngine / Crysis 3 shows what the true relative performance of cards is. All cards run equally well (or shit) on it, it pushes every button in the architecture and it taxes VRAM the most (look at the VRAM req for Crysis 3, 3GB is no luxury).

To chime in on the 4GB/8GB thing.... 8GB is pretty pointless. At all demanding titles you run out of GPU grunt long before you run into 8GB or even 4GB limits. For a crossfire setup, yes. If you intend to never resell your card and take it past 2-3 years of use, then yes, 8GB can bring you something down the line. In all other situations, the larger memory is a total waste, both in cost of the card as power consumption and it is silly to pay a premium for it.

That said, 390 is a solid offering regardless of 8GB or not. The major issue for me with picking it over a 970 would be AMD's driver model, which still isn't what it should be (can't really say that Crimson instilled faith thus far) and the lacking optimization on more recent titles. It's a shame really. Power draw is also an issue, but when temps are under control as they are on this Sapphire, that really doesn't matter to me.

 

[Casecutter]

Wow I was surprise with this and the response in the forms on this review. Honestly, hadn't come across earlier, as I've been caught up with other family health concerns, and didn't see this till now.

When I run through the titles @1440p the NITRO was more often "hanging-out" with a GTX980, not the 970. There's like 4 games the NITRO was below the Nvidia pair, and nobody in this form appears merit those results? Sure BF4, GTAV, SolidV, Witcher3 those games we anticipate Nvidia pulling in front but that leaves 11 titles. Here's a card that's Newegg's has $325 -AR$15, and it's sparing with a $450+ card! Now sure we're talking a reference 970/980 in these tests of W1zzard's, but will a 1367 MHz Boost 970 like say the GTX 970 ACX 2.0 FTW a $350 -AR$10 card get into the hunt perhaps a little more often. From the 1440p Summary there an 11% spread, so it's amazing how stout this NITRO is. Sure I think the 970/390 dovetail in performance when looking similar factory "soup'd-up" models, so it just comes down to a preference.

As for power under gaming; I still would like to see such similar factory "soup'd-up" models, and then pull the Watts that each card uses over the B-M, with the entire list of titles W1zzard works from. I think the final average(s)... while in the Mawell's favor would not be as prominent as just pulling a number from one title like that of Metro: Last Light @1080p (not even a title that is used in the review). I mean look at something like the Palit GTX 970 JetStream it exacts ~25% more power on the same matrix. I think we aren't crediting what AMD has in these Hawaii rebrand.

 

[Intervention]

I don't. Cramming large amounts of memory on lower than flagship cards has always been nothing more than a marketing gimmick.



What history have you been looking at, because the history I've seen shows that large amounts of VRAM shoved on a mid-range or lower card turns out to be nothing more than a gimmick and the VRAM never gets used. By the time it becomes relevant the GPU is too weak to render the games that need that amount of RAM at the settings that need that amount of RAM.



No issues with 4k there.



No issues there either.



Only an issues with the HD Texture back installed, which makes no visual difference in gameplay.



Who still even plays this game? But, yeah, I guess if it is still your #1 game, the 390 is your best option.



I played the entire game in 4k. No problems at all.



People who say things like this obviously don't know how the memory works on graphics cards. Games have been over running the VRAM on cards for as long as I can remember, there is a system in place for this, and when it happens the least likely to be used textures(the ones farthest away from the player in the scene) are paged out to system RAM.

That is why there is no real benefit to more than 4GB of RAM, that is why the Fury cards still outperform the 390s, even in all the games you listed.

Lets see:

• Every reviewer has said 8GB doesn't matter.
• AMD Themselves have said 4GB is enough for the current generation

But yeah, keep up the hope that those 8GB are going to come in handy...someday...

I don't. Cramming large amounts of memory on lower than flagship cards has always been nothing more than a marketing gimmick.



What history have you been looking at, because the history I've seen shows that large amounts of VRAM shoved on a mid-range or lower card turns out to be nothing more than a gimmick and the VRAM never gets used. By the time it becomes relevant the GPU is too weak to render the games that need that amount of RAM at the settings that need that amount of RAM.



No issues with 4k there.



No issues there either.



Only an issues with the HD Texture back installed, which makes no visual difference in gameplay.



Who still even plays this game? But, yeah, I guess if it is still your #1 game, the 390 is your best option.



I played the entire game in 4k. No problems at all.



People who say things like this obviously don't know how the memory works on graphics cards. Games have been over running the VRAM on cards for as long as I can remember, there is a system in place for this, and when it happens the least likely to be used textures(the ones farthest away from the player in the scene) are paged out to system RAM.

That is why there is no real benefit to more than 4GB of RAM, that is why the Fury cards still outperform the 390s, even in all the games you listed.

Lets see:

• Every reviewer has said 8GB doesn't matter.
• AMD Themselves have said 4GB is enough for the current generation

But yeah, keep up the hope that those 8GB are going to come in handy...someday...

I have a GTX 960 4GB, and I surely see the difference while playing games like FarCry4 and BF4, where the vram goes up to 3-4GB usage. Having more VRAM absolutely helps, specially in SLI configurations, where only a single card vram amount is used. Having that extra VRAM will definitely help the performance.
Also, right now you may not benefit from the extra VRAM, but soon to come out open world games will definitely take advantage of that extra memory. The current generation of higher end cards today will still perform well at 1080 and 1440 resolutions for a few years to come, such as in the case of the 780ti and R9 290's.

The only marketing gimmick I have noticed is the trend insinuating that GTX 900 series and R9 300 series are now obsolete, therefor you need to upgrade to the newest and greatest. That is crap! Personally, I think of GPU's the same way I think of CPU's. You have 22nm micro technology for Ivy Bridge and Haswell. Both are essentially the same micro technology, Haswell having improved microarchitecture. The so called "tick tock". But, they are still the same micro technology. Likewise, for me atleast, if the GPU is, 1. DX12 ready and 2. has the same microtechnology as the "newer" gpu's, they are the same generation and as good as the new ones, even if the new GPU's are faster.

The RX 480 is coming out soon, and I was planning to wait for its release before upgrading to a faster card, but the R9 390's went on sale here in Norway for $280, which is the same price as what the RX 480 4GB are going to sale for in Norway, having a little more or less performance than an R9 390. I want the extra VRAM, so the R9 390 was the better choice, for me. Cheers!

 

[Octopuss]

Does anyone happen to own the X version of this card? I'd like to confirm it doesn't behave any differently (as in significantly mor noise or whatever) than this.