AMD goes back to Hawaii for its ‘new’ mainstream flagship
A step down from the Fury X, AMD’s pitting the R9 390X — its new mainstream flagship GPU — against Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 980. And priced at around $100 cheaper, it just might have what it takes to seal the deal.
There are some caveats to the 390X, however. This is based on the same Hawaii architecture as the 200-series — not the newer Fiji silicon used in the Fury X. In fact, for its entire 300-series line up, AMD’s essentially just gone back and retooled all its 200-series cards, occasionally bumping clock speeds and adding more and/or faster GDDR5 RAM. Looking purely at specs, it’s clear how similar the two cards are: both are based on a 28nm lithography, have 2,816 shaders and 176 texture mapping units. There are bumps in core and memory clock speeds — up 50MHz and 250MHz respectively to a 1,050MHz core and 1,500MHz memory — which are where the obvious performance gains largely come from. AMD’s made some design tweaks to ensure this new design is fully DirectX 12 compliant, but Hawaii’s key flaws — namely that it’s power hungry — otherwise carry through to the 390X.
In fact, the latter are something that’s made clear just from glancing at the design of this MSI model. With a honkin’ great 2.5 slot-width cooler the whole thing weighs in at a hefty 1.3kg. To be fair, MSI’s Twin Frozr V design does keep the card temperatures down to an impressive 74ºC when under load (we’ve seen 290X’s reach 90ºC), but the twin fans can become audible when they kick into top gear, like when you’re gaming at 4K.
And the 390X will let you play at 4K — though only just. Stocked with 8GB of memory as standard, it mostly manages to scratch out frame rates of above 30fps in modern games — although there are certain games where the GTX 980 and its ‘lowly’ 4GB outdo the AMD card. In fact, at 4K resolution, who’s faster seesaws back and forth between the two depending on the game you’re testing. And if you’re serious about 4K then the Fury X or 980 Ti are better choices, able to eek out a critical 25% speed boost.
At lower resolutions the story is a little clearer, with MSI slightly-overclocked design typically pulling ahead of a stock-clocked GTX 980 by a few percent. Honestly though, there’s not much in it, and there’s a game or two where the 980 can be up to 20% faster.
But then there are the power bills to worry about. To get that slight edge, the 390X pulls over 40% more power than the GTX 980. Our Intel test system drew up to 507W from the wall when running games on the 390X, for example, whereas the 980 never got over 290W. And if you game a lot, that extra power draw could eat up any initial saving you make when buying a card.
In short, while MSI’s 390X does largely match the GTX 980 (and at a substantially lower price), this is an undeniably ageing hardware design — and AMD’s really pushed it to get the performance where it needs to be. While that means that AMD’s bought itself some more time to get its mainstream Fiji (aka Fury) cards sorted, it’s worth pointing out that the Hawaii XT 290X was released way back in October 2013. While that’s perhaps a good indicator of the architecture’s longevity, it’s hard to see it holding up as well for another 18+ months. Dan Gardiner
While this is an impressive retooling of AMD’s existing 290X design, it needs serious cooling and draws lots of power.