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Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB Review

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The Sapphire R9 290 Nitro ships in a dark box, with another robot on the front.
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There are some technical details on the back of the box, if you happen to be buying inside a physical retail store.
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Our box included a quality HDMI cable, a software disc and some literature on the product.
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Understated – we like it. Sapphire have opted for a clean, black and gunmetal visage – with three ‘Nitro' stickers on the fans. Black tends to suit any matched, coloured system build, so its a good choice.
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The card is equipped with a dual link DVI-D connector, three DisplayPort 1.2a connectors and a single HDMI 1.4a connector. Sadly, no support for the new HDMI 2.0 standard – which means you can’t get 4K 60hz from this connector. This is something I do depend on myself as I use a 4K Sony TV for my gaming (which has only HDMI ports).
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The card takes power from two eight pin PCIe connectors. It has bridge less Crossfire support, exactly like the 290 and 290x.
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Due to all the screws, it takes quite some time to remove the cooler. We can see the GDDR5 memory is directly cooled from the heatsink above. 10mm heatpipes expel heat from the copper heatpipe, across a large rack of aluminum fins which span the full width of the PCB. The diecast heatsink bolts into the PCB to help improve rigidity. Sapphire equip the card with their Diamond Black chokes to help improve stability and longevity.
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An overview of the Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB. It is built on the 28nm process, has 64 ROPs, 160 Texture units, and 2560 unifed shaders. The core is clocked at a rather modest 1,010mhz, only 10mhz over the reference design – I was expecting 1,050mhz. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1,500mhz, or 6Gbps effective – an improvement over the R9 290, which on the reference design was set at 5Gbps effective.

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18 comments

  1. All these benchmarks for games.. can anyone anywhere on the web give me information on using one of these cards in pro applications like Adobe Premiere Pro? I’m wondering how well the 8gb VRAM will help when scrubbing through an effect filled timeline, or if CUDA is still the way to go? I hear lots of opinions, but no testing results. Unfortunately I can’t afford to buy a card from either side and work it out myself.

  2. email me at zardon(at)kitguru.net ill try and help James.

  3. i wouldn’t mind knowing as well, i’m having to put together a workstation focused system for the first time

  4. Mads-Ejnar Kehlet

    When do GPU maker stop using “CTRL+C” “CTRL+V” and then rename?
    Not only AMD, Nvidia dose it also. but at lease the they go from 580 to 670.
    290x to 390x with 99% same card? then make something like 290x boost or anything else then 390x :/

  5. Thanks Allan, I have emailed you just now.

  6. valgarlienheart .

    Damn, kinda wished I waited on that 970 I got, this non x version seems to be an excellent value card. Who cares if it’s a rebrand, it’s still relavent.

  7. Nicholas Gagliardo

    Seriously though, what do you do with all those cards? ‘Cause the way I look at it, you could have a serious “make a college student’s day” type of deal here. After all, in Graduate school we suffer to do our part to contribute to society, a pat on the back in the process never hurt.

  8. Those chips arent the same thing. The GTX 670 is based on the GK104. You could say the same thing when nVidia moved from GTX 480 to GTX 580 which both were identical except some performance improvements and more shaders. Both are guilty of these practices and won’t go away any soon.

  9. I’d liked to have seen Fury X numbers in the graphs too…

  10. Yes, coming soon…… Bit of a backlog, sorry..

  11. Ahhh right, that’s great thanks 🙂

  12. Which card should i buy 39 or 970. I usually game at 1080p and use 550 watts PSU. Please advise anyone

  13. it would be great if 1080 P benchmarks were available

  14. 550 is not enought for the 390 acording to shappire. The 970 is your card.

  15. i just bought this card, but i’d really appreciate a compare between 390 nitro vs 970 g1, stock and oc.
    Can you help me?

  16. Ordered mine Yesterday, now I wait Oo

  17. hey, is cx600m is enough for this card(sapphire r9 390)?

  18. That psu isn’t very good.
    An xfx is much better.
    Anyway, 600W is plenty, unless you plan to OC and will use an OC’ed CPU.