XFX lures hard-core gamers with a monster R9 390X design
As regular readers are aware, we pride ourselves on bringing you technology that does something worthwhile at an affordable price. But occasionally as a reviewer I need to take a walk on the wild side – a phrase that certainly sums up the XFX R9 390X Double Dissipation Core Edition.
If you like subtle stuff, then I’d look away now, because this kit has all the balletic finesse of a maniac loose at a hammer convention.
For those unfamiliar with the many stratified layers of performance, the 390X comes a small notch below the completely insane ‘Fury’ level in AMD’s current GPU line-up.
Technically, it uses a derivative of the Hawaii XT core that first appeared in the Radeon R9 290X, though AMD renamed it Grenada XT these days.
That only uses the GCN 1.1 architecture, not the new 1.2 model, though it's still compatible with DX12, Vulkan, Mantle, and any other popular video APIs you're likely to encounter on the PC.
The specification, as you might expect for this money, is suborbital. The 438mm2 die features approximately 6.2 billion resistors, organised into a whopping 2,816 unified shaders coupled to 8GB (yes, people, 8GB!) of GDDR5 via a 512-bit memory bus. There are 64 ROPs and 176 TMUs, and the memory offers a massive total bandwidth of 384GB/s.
If you consider that displaying a 1080p display 24 bits deep at 60fps takes 350MB/s, in theory this card could generate more than a thousand of them simultaneously.
With that level of power on tap, the forte here is to handle multiple 4K displays in a gaming environment like most other cards cope with rendering a single 1080p one.
By default this card can drive up to six displays through Eyefinity mode, and it comes with dual DVI, HDMI and fullsize DisplayPort outputs.
Obviously, with all this GPU power it makes relatively short order of most tests, and I was forced to break out the 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra test just to see it actually break a sweat.
For most gamers there's more power here than you could reasonably need or want, given current titles.
However, there are a few things about it that aren’t ideal.
The first and most obvious one is the sheer scale of this card, because XFX’s excellent Ghost Thermal 3.0 Technology system might keep it remarkably quiet, but it doesn’t make it any smaller.
From the back plate to the deepest point is 281mm, making it unsuitable for smaller cases, and weighing in at 921g, it also needs to be properly secured.
The other requirement at least a 750W PSU, with both eight- and six-pin PCIe power lines. That hints that power consumption is high, and it is.
Under stress testing, my LGA 2011 test platform was consistently drawing over 430 watts, and a decent portion of that power was going to the GPU. When you consider that those numbers don’t include the screen(s), the power bill for long gaming sessions might well add up.
If you want to use even more juice, XFX has unlocked the voltage, so you can tweak the shader and memory clocks until the lights in your home dim appreciably.
And then there's the purchase price, which more than most people would spend on their motherboard and CPU combination. If you want this power and excellent build quality, then this is the cost, regrettably.
Looking beyond the costs, there are two important things that need to be said about this card for those who potentially might be interested.
The first is that if you’re not looking to game with 4K or more than three displays, then there are cheaper cards that will do that job admirably. The difference between 100 frames per second and double that is mostly irrelevant, however brilliant a gamer you might be.
The other is that the cheapest Fury design is about £85 more, has even more shaders and bandwidth, and has the latest technology, though half as much memory.
But actually the real threat to success here is the R9 290X cards still in the channel, because in the majority of scenarios they perform almost as well and can be found for £50 less.
As much as I like what XFX did with this card, and it is gloriously engineered, those who want ultimate power will still want an AMD Fury or an Nvidia GTX 980 card. So while this card is a monster, there are even bigger ones out there. Mark Pickavance
Massively powerful video card for multidisplay gaming.