390X vs 290X with 15.7 drivers?

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Feb 19, 2009
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It's working for AMD though, retailers I know here personally, they had trouble moving 290/X all that time, even with models like XFX, Tri-X, PCS+ etc. They didn't move until the clear out sale pricing started, where basically 290 was almost half the price of a 970 (inflated due to our silly taxes) and the R290X was again half the price of a 980!

Now, 390/X are selling very well at the same retailers. They often go out of stock and have a long pre-order lists to fill from new shipments.

As soon as the hot & loud reference R290/X set in, gamers avoided it like the plague, it takes only very informed buyers to realize custom R290/X was an awesome deal. The 300 series launch? Most of them were quiet, they all ran very cool, some of them were so quiet reviewers could not believe it. Performance is improved and the masses see 8GB vram!

Lisa Su, well played!

ps. @shady28 680 -> 780 wasn't a refresh, it was a new SKU. Entirely different chip.
 
Feb 19, 2009
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Here's the R290X OC comparison, one of the best models, MSI Lightning, they got only 1,180mhz on it though! Seems a trend with R290/X reviews, reviewers typically average 1,150mhz on it. Very few models go above so no cherry picking.

R290X MSI Lightning @ 1,180mhz
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R390X MSI Gaming @ 1,200mhz
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Don't disregard lower vram latency (along with bandwidth).

During the mining era, people found changing the latency table on the vram resulted in ~20% extra throughput, even with vram clocks remaining the same. GCN has excessive shaders for their front end, I would guess its difficult to keep uptime on them all 100%, and lower vram latency definitely helps with that.
 
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