PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 390 8GB GDDR5 Review

We’ve only had our hands on the Powercolor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ card for a very short time, but spent a little while overlcocking to see what kind of additional performance we could squeeze out of the card. Due to time constraints, we kept things simple, but were still able to massage a few additional MHz from the card’s GPU and memory.

To overlcock the card, we used the Overdrive tools built right into AMD’s drives. First we cranked up the power target by 20% and kicked up the GPU by 10% and increased the memory clock by 75MHz. Unfortunately, though some games ran at these settings, others (like Bioshock) crashed. Ultimately, we re-stabilized things with an 8.5% increase to the GPU clock and a 55MHz increase in the memory, which resulted in a 1095MHz GPU clock and 1555MHz memory.

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While we had the card overclocked, we re-ran a couple of tests and saw some marked improvement in performance. The increases aren’t huge, but free performance is always welcome in our book.

Marco Chiappetta

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com

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