PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 390 8GB GDDR5 Review
Introduction and Specifiations
AMD officially took the wraps off of its Radeon R7 and R9 300 series of graphics cards, and disclosed some details regarding the R9 Fury—a.k.a Fiji—during a livestream held near the E3 convention earlier this week. We have much of the information revealed during the event posted for you right here if you’d like to take a look.
Today though, we’ve actually got one of the “new” Radeon R9 300 series cards in-hand for some review and benchmark action. We put “new” in quotes, because the entire R7 and R9 300 series lineup is built around the same GPUs used in the R7 an R9 200 series. The Powercolor PCS+ R9 390 8GB card we’ll be showing you here, for example, features an AMD Hawaii GPU at its heart, similar to the Radeon R9 290. There have been some tweaks make to the clocks and memory configurations on the cards though, which will change the performance landscape somewhat. We’ll find out by how much on the pages ahead...
Today though, we’ve actually got one of the “new” Radeon R9 300 series cards in-hand for some review and benchmark action. We put “new” in quotes, because the entire R7 and R9 300 series lineup is built around the same GPUs used in the R7 an R9 200 series. The Powercolor PCS+ R9 390 8GB card we’ll be showing you here, for example, features an AMD Hawaii GPU at its heart, similar to the Radeon R9 290. There have been some tweaks make to the clocks and memory configurations on the cards though, which will change the performance landscape somewhat. We’ll find out by how much on the pages ahead...
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| Specification | PCS+ R9 390 8GB GDDR5 |
| Video Memory | 8GB GDDR5 |
| Stream Processor | 2560 Units |
| Engine Clock | 1010MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1500MHz (6.0Gbps) |
| Memory Interface | 512bit |
| Bus Standard | PCIE 3.0 |
| Display Connector | DL DVI-D/DL DVI-D/HDMI/DP |
| Form Factor | ATX |
| Cooler | 3 slot Fan sink(trio fan) |
| Power Connector | One 6-pin + One 8-pin PCI Express Connector |
| Crossfire Support | Yes |
| OpenGL | 4.4 |
| DirectX Support | 12 |
| Minimum System Power Requirement (W) | 750W |
If you take the time to inspect the table above, lots of the data may look familiar to you. And that’s because the Radeon R9 390 is an evolutionary update to the R9 290—they feature the very same AMD Hawaii GPU with 2,560 stream processors, but with slightly different clocks. The memory configuration, however, has been changed more substantially. There’s now 8GB of GDDR5 on board, clocked at 1,500MHz for an effective 6.0GHz. The original, reference R9 290 had only 4GB clocked at 1,250MHz. There are some other differences as well, but we’ll get to those on the next page. For now, let’s see what PowerColor throws into the retail package to get gamers up and running.
