[Guru3d] MSI 390X Gaming 8G OC review

[96Firebird]

Military class components!

 

[.vodka]

All of MSI's products have "military class components".

I must say, while the card is a rebrand, the move is brilliant. In the least amount of invested resources, AMD managed to "put out" a card that, in the eyes of the average Joe (who only knew of the hot and loud 290X and never looked further), reverses that reputation. From a business standpoint this rebrand strategy is actually way better than if they pour a ton of money into a new top to bottom line up.

The win here isn't the card. It's what the card is doing against the reference 290X image. I now get why AMD charges this much for this card: They don't expect to or need to sell many of these. They just need these cards to clear the air to be springboard for the Fury series. And that's exactly what these will do.

This. A million times. This can't get quoted enough.

Average joe finally gets to see what the 290x was supposed to be two years ago (a true competitor not only to the 780Ti but also to the later launched 980, not the 970) while removing AMD's tarnished image in the process.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/amd-radeon-300-series/3

AT preview


Last but certainly not least however, we want to talk a bit more about the performance optimizations AMD has been working on for the 390 series. While we’re still tracking down more details on just what changes AMD has made, AMD had told us that there are a number of small changes from the 290 series to the 390 series that should improve performance by several percent on a clock-for-clock, apples-to-apples basis. That means along with the 20% memory clockspeed increase and 5% GPU clockspeed increase, we should see further performance improvements from these lower-level changes, which is also why we can’t just overclock a 290X and call it a 390X.


So what are those changes? From our discussions with AMD, we have been told that the clock-for-clock performance gains comes from a multitude of small factors, things the company has learned from and been able to optimize for over the last 2 years. AMD did not name all of those factors, but there were a couple of optimizations in particular that were pointed out.


The first optimization is that AMD has gone back and refined their process for identifying the operating voltages of Hawaii chips, with the net outcome being that Hawaii voltages should be down a hair, reducing power and/or thermal throttling. The second optimization mentioned is that the 4Gb GDDR5 chips being used offer better timings than the 2Gb chips, which can depending on the timings improve various aspects of memory performance. Most likely AMD has reinvested these timing gains into improving the memory clockspeeds, but until we get our hands on a 390X card we won’t know for sure.

Better binning, better memory (with the side effect of being 8GB total vs 4GB) and a handful of little improvements here and there to free some TDP relative to the 290/x that then get used for a little overclock, and no reference designs. All these that had gone ignored on the aftermarket 290/x are now the new series.

Nice, non expensive way to make their product competitive again. Nice refresh, like 680->770.

 

[krumme]

Military class components!

Guys this is more than a 290x with a new cooler. 290x didnt suddenly perform like a 980.

We have extra clock core 5 %
20% extra membandwith
As AT hinted probably also changed timing for the mem
New voltage binning for lower watt
And imo the boards looks refined to me. Fanless at idle ...

A rebrand doesnt make a 290x a 980. I thinks a refresh is a better word. Its is good step up for perf.

 

[railven]

Welps, end conclusion for me is this is making me even more excited for Fury X. 6 more days!

 

[RussianSensation]

Military class components!

That's your rebuttal that 390/390X are now cool, quiet, have high build quality PCB/power circuitry, turn off the fans at idle and are going to make 970/980 overpriced? It's just a matter of 1-2 quarters before prices on these cards start falling. The minute a 390X starts approaching $350 mark, it's game over for both the 970 and 980 without NV's price drops. Between 390X, Fury Nano and Fury PRO $549, 980 is going to suffer collateral damage starting late this summer and until Pascal drops. NV will have no choice but to drop prices on 980 again or start adding more game bundles/GW titles into reviews.

This. A million times. This can't get quoted enough.

Average joe finally gets to see what the 290x was supposed to be two years ago (a true competitor not only to the 780Ti but also to the later launched 980, not the 970) while removing AMD's tarnished image in the process.

TemjinGold hit the nail on the head. Average Joe walks into a store, 390X and 980 both run cool, quiet, turn the fans off at idle, performance is within 5-7% but 390X costs way less and has double the VRAM (he thinks more slower GDDR5 VRAM is future-proofing). For the price difference he can almost step up from an i3 to an i5 or almost from an i5 to an i7 or get an SSD. This person probably doesn't overclock.

 

[96Firebird]

That's your rebuttal that 390/390X are now cool, quiet, have high build quality PCB/power circuitry, turn off the fans at idle and are going to make 970/980 overpriced? It's just a matter of 1-2 quarters before prices on these cards start falling. The minute a 390X starts approaching $350 mark, it's game over for both the 970 and 980 without NV's price drops. Between 390X, Fury Nano and Fury PRO $549, 980 is going to suffer collateral damage starting late this summer and until Pascal drops. NV will have no choice but to drop prices on 980 again or start adding more game bundles/GW titles into reviews.

Whoa, hey, calm down there Nancy! I was making a joke about MSI's marketing, and somehow that made you go on this rant?

Get a grip. D:

We get it, you hate the 970 and 980 for whatever reason. You don't need to rant about it in every post.

The 290X Gaming also had "military class components", if that is so important to you.

 

[bryanW1995]

That's your rebuttal that 390/390X are now cool, quiet, have high build quality PCB/power circuitry, turn off the fans at idle and are going to make 970/980 overpriced? It's just a matter of 1-2 quarters before prices on these cards start falling. The minute a 390X starts approaching $350 mark, it's game over for both the 970 and 980 without NV's price drops. Between 390X, Fury Nano and Fury PRO $549, 980 is going to suffer collateral damage starting late this summer and until Pascal drops. NV will have no choice but to drop prices on 980 again or start adding more game bundles/GW titles into reviews.

TemjinGold hit the nail on the head. Average Joe walks into a store, 390X and 980 both run cool, quiet, turn the fans off at idle, performance is +/-5%, 390X costs way less and has double the VRAM (he thinks more slower GDDR5 VRAM is future-proofing).

Man, the more I look at pricing segments the more I question this. NV has (with now AMD's support) managed to bump up the flagship gpu price to $650, causing diminishing value parts to slot into higher price brackets than before. Look at this:

980ti/fury x - $650
fury pro - $550
980/nano - $450-550 ??
3900x - $430
970/3900 - $330

3900 would have been 3700 in older nomenclature, and 970 would have been 960. These are both pretty low performance parts that have creeped up to extremely high pricing. AMD could have jumped into this fray with something more like:

Fury X - $500
Fury Pro - $425
Fury nano - $375
3900x - $299
3900 - $199

That would have blown the market away. It's what they did when 4870 launched, causing huge (and painful) price cuts by NV. However, Lisa Su clearly has more of an eye on profits than her predecessors did...we might not see the huge price cuts that we want now. I don't think there's any collusion there, but lets just say that Lisa and jhh are both on the same page vis a vis profits.

It does look like NV has room for another sku though...I think that they'll position 980ti down $100 to compete head to head with Fury Pro and bring out a 980ti + Ultra Extreme Edition™ to go after Fury X. TX will quietly go away.

We get it, you hate the 970 and 980 for whatever reason. You don't need to rant about it in every post.

It's funny how people remember it when you lie to them about the size of your (Ram) package.

 

[Subyman]

Too bad AMD didn't initially release the R9 290/X with this strategy. It would have been a different situation now.

 

[RussianSensation]

We get it, you hate the 970 and 980 for whatever reason. You don't need to rant about it in every post.

I've recommended 970 to many gamers, one such user is running MSI Gaming 970 SLI on our boards. You can probably find who that is. He messed me in the PM for his GPU recommendation. I don't hate on 970 when it's a good deal like Gigabyte G1 GTX970 for $300. 980 simply makes no sense and never did, so why would I recommend it? It was always overpriced and remains so. 980 is a non-contender due to its current price and performance standing. If its price falls, it could become an amazing buy. Now that we know Fury is coming in at $549 and 390X is $429, 980 is way out to lunch to be priced at $499.

What's there to praise 970 on? It's a good card, nothing beyond that. I was ready to buy 2 Gigabyte 970s at launch and almost pulled the trigger but then days following reviews I realized that card barely moved the performance metric above an after-market $399 290 that was selling for $350-375 for 6 months before 970 dropped. I am not the one who waited 10 months to get a slightly bump in performance over a 290 for $50 less. 970 is essentially a 660 and 980 is a 660Ti. Why would I be hyping those cards up when I know they were overpriced against $240 290 and $270 290X and NV lied about 970's specs? Get real.

Man, the more I look at pricing segments the more I question this. NV has (with now AMD's support) managed to bump up the flagship gpu price to $650, causing diminishing value parts to slot into higher price brackets than before.

The market has voted and they didn't buy AMD's amazing price/performance cards during HD4000-R9 200 series. If we take the entire generations of those series against NV, AMD won on price/performance in every pricing segment except they didn't have the single chip performance crown except HD7970Ghz which clearly was faster than the 680 (and 290X at 4K vs. 780Ti).

If this strategy hasn't worked, it's fitting that Lisa Su decided to change strategy. I mean how do you explain NV getting away with a $380 770 2GB and $450 770 4GB when HD7970Ghz/R9 280X was $300. Lisa Su realized you can't convert green loyalists so might as well make money off brand agnostic users. This is unfortunate now because the budget gamer got wiped out in the process with nothing worth buying now between $150-290 after seeing $240 R9 290 for 6+ months. Also, the low end is just a disaster. 750/750Ti are garbage for gaming, 960 is gimped and slow, Pitcairn has outdated features. It's almost like the new mid-range sweet spot has moved up to $300-350 and high-end is now strictly at $650-700 range. Hopefully Fury PRO will be a very competitive card at $550 as we really need a solid buy between $400-600 and right now there is no such card.

It does look like NV has room for another sku though...I think that they'll position 980ti down $100 to compete head to head with Fury Pro and bring out a 980ti + Ultra Extreme Edition™ to go after Fury X. TX will quietly go away.

Ya, NV has lots of options. They can add game bundles, drop prices, bring out 960Ti, 970Ti, another cut down GM200 card and a fully unlocked 1200mhz 980TI Black Edition. I don't think NV is sweating at all.

It's funny how people remember it when you lie to them about the size of your (Ram) package.

It's amazing how he keeps defending NV and he is a 970 owner. If I bought an HD7970 and later found out it was only a 2.5GB card, and AMD literally did nothing (no game bundle, no remorse, no admittance of doing anything wrong, no discount on future purchase), I would skip AMD's cards for at least 1 generation. I don't like it when companies lie to me about specs. Add to that NV locking mobile dGPU overclocking, calling Kepler performance in GW games a bug, they are seriously on a slipper slope right now in the eyes of many objective gamers. 780/780Ti/OG Titan owners must be pissed as hell. The performance advantages of those cards got wiped out completely.

Too bad AMD didn't initially release the R9 290/X with this strategy. It would have been a different situation now.

I know. At the same time if that had happened, we wouldn't have seen $220-240 290s and $270-300 290Xs for the last 6 months. That means AMD's costly mistake got someone really fast cards for much cheaper than what the market is going to look like starting end of this week.

 

[AnandThenMan]

let me leave this here.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...69646-amd-r9-390x-8gb-performance-review.html

He couldn't bring himself to praise the card outright but his faint praise is regular praise from an objective reviewer. Reading the Guru3d review right now the tone in similar, excepted the card to suck but it doesn't.

Shines a very bright light on how badly AMD bungled the 290 release.

 

[frozentundra123456]

It's not a selling point against the 980. No one is saying 8GB is a selling point because of 8GB. It's about having 4GB at minimum which is what it delivers. 970 doesn't. Since there are no 390/390X 4GB cards, we have to type "8GB > 970 4GB" but it's not because we are saying games will benefit from "8GB". You are just trying to twist what's being portrayed into some agenda, when it's as simple as 3.5GB GDDR5 vs. "at least 4GB" (aka 8GB card). Also, the comparison to a $379-399 770 2GB is 100% valid. NV charged $50-80 premium for 770 4GB, and it offered a similar 8-10% performance increase - constant praise from NV fans. Now a 390X is trading blows with a 980, sometimes an overclocked 980 and instead of acknowledging that, don't start shifting goal posts to 8GB GDDR5 vs. 4GB HBM. It's not relevant to 390/390X vs. 970/980.

The issue with the 970 is NV lied about its specs, covered it up until got caught red-handed and showed no remorse by not even offering refunds, a gaming coupon, or a discount towards a future NV card purchased. AIBs are the ones who stepped up. Now that an after-market 390 has 12% higher clocks than a reference 290X and it has at least 4GB of real GDDR5 that runs at 6100mhz, do you think people are going to be that eager to recommend a GTX970? Add to that that NV claimed Kepler performance is a bug and laptop overclocking was also a bug. Let's get real -- AMD is trying its hardest to compete while NV pisses on its customers at any opportunity they can and use marketing/PR to brush it aside. $550 980? What a joke.

These MSI cards are also redesigned from the ground up with high quality power circuitry and components. While prices of $329/$429 are too high, and I will easily admit that, once prices drop and rebates are added, it's going to be very difficult to recommend 970/980 against these cards. Built quality, real 4GB VRAM, great cooling, good stock performance - it's all there.

No one is defending Fury for having just 4GB of VRAM. What's being debated are sites that spread FUD how 6GB is required as a MINIMUM for 4K gaming while their own benchmarks don't show 4GB VRAM bottlenecks on GTX980 SLI (the same for other sites that all show 980 SLI outperforming Titan in nearly all games where SLI scales).

Comparing 970's VRAM fiasco with Fury's 4GB HBM is apples and oranges.



Agreed. They should have launched the entire R9 300 series January 1, 2015, or earlier. I think they had too much stock of 200 series to sell. It would have been too costly financially to drop prices to clear that many 200 series of cards. Looks like they either had contracts with TSMC for ordering a certain number of wafers per quarter they needed to meet or someone overestimated demand for 200 series due to bit mining and the result was an overabundance of 200 series chips.

The context I was speaking of was the posters who were saying, or at least implying, that 8gb was one of the justifications for the increased price of 390X over 290X. I was not comparing 970 vs Fury in this case. But if you want to go there, I would be just as (or more) comfortable with 3.5gb for an upper mid range card like the 970 than with only 4gb for the Flagship Fury. 970 really isnt a 4k card anyway, where vram is most critical, and Fury supposedly is.

 

[AnandThenMan]

To be fair, the 970 is marketed as a full 4GB video card. No where does Nvidia say anything about it being a 3.5+0.5 card and most reviews don't either. I personally don't think 8GB on the 390x is going to do much if anything for performance but from a marketing perspective it won't hurt.

 

[blackrook]

I am not sure about faster than a 980 but next year NV will have to optimize drivers for Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal -- 4 different architectures. Among those architectures, there are some serious issues (Fermi and Kepler have weak compute performance, Maxwell has 970 that requires its own VRAM optimizations). I just don't see NV having the resources to be able to optimize drivers for 4 different architectures. AMD on the other hand just has GCN and they'll have no choice but to optimize VRAM usage on Fury since HBM is going to be the base for a lot of their future products. NV doesn't need to optimize for 970's 3.5GB of VRAM once Pascal drops since it'll actually entice users to upgrade from a 970 quicker.

What do you call Bonaire, Hawaii, Tonga, and Fiji then?

 

[railven]

To be fair, the 970 is marketed as a full 4GB video card. No where does Nvidia say anything about it being a 3.5+0.5 card and most reviews don't either. I personally don't think 8GB on the 390x is going to do much if anything for performance but from a marketing perspective it won't hurt.

If I Had to guess, I think RS is referring more to the whole package. The marketed launch specs versus what was revealed a few months later were completely off.

 

[IEC]

Not a rebrand. Refresh. Even AnandTech calls it that.

From AnandTech:

Last but certainly not least however, we want to talk a bit more about the performance optimizations AMD has been working on for the 390 series. While we’re still tracking down more details on just what changes AMD has made, AMD had told us that there are a number of small changes from the 290 series to the 390 series that should improve performance by several percent on a clock-for-clock, apples-to-apples basis. That means along with the 20% memory clockspeed increase and 5% GPU clockspeed increase, we should see further performance improvements from these lower-level changes, which is also why we can’t just overclock a 290X and call it a 390X.

 

[Lalilulelo]

Refresh Indeed. The average joe only cares about perf/watt , gotta save on electricity bills [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲&#773̲̅$̲̅]

 

[Face2Face]

The 390X is performing quite well at stock speeds and even better @ 1200Mhz, but most GTX 980 custom cards have no problem hitting 1500MHz+ - Which makes them faster @ 1080/1440p than a 390X OC @ 1200Mhz. I'm not sure if 1200Mhz will be a common OC for Grenada GPUs with proper cooling, but most Hawaii cards struggled to hit it, even with a decent cooling setup.

Even so, at the current price point, a GTX 980 only makes sense for those wanting lower power consumption. I'm sure the 390X overclocked pulls quite bit, vs. an overclocked GTX 980.

If I was buying based on the current prices, I'd personally reach for the R9 390X, as 100w or so, wouldn't make much difference to me.

390X - 1200/1650

GTX 980 - 1584/1990

 

[rainy]

I would tend to agree that from marketing point of view it's rather a clever/smart move, however quite a bit cynical too.
On the other hand I presume that after debut of Fury Nano on the 400-450 dollars range, AMD will cut prices of 390x/390 by 70/50 dollars making them more reasonable.

 

[IEC]

Refresh Indeed. The average joe only cares about perf/watt , gotta save on electricity bills [̲̅$̲̅(̲̅ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°̲&#773̲̅$̲̅]

 

[tg2708]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the fury x the titan x competitor, pro up against the 980ti, nano middle ground and the 390/x 970 and 980 equivalent? So in this this case a 350 price reduction, 100, priced liked competitors msrp and another under cut of 70 dollars respectively makes AMD a better value proposition barring nvidia's extra's. So if the fury x is all that it was meant/hyped up to be has just killed "two birds with one stone" leaving the pro to show how at current prices the 980ti (others as well) is not so much of a better purchase against their direct competitor.

 

[x3sphere]

The 390X is performing quite well at stock speeds and even better @ 1200Mhz, but most GTX 980 custom cards have no problem hitting 1500MHz+ - Which makes them faster @ 1080/1440p than a 390X OC @ 1200Mhz. I'm not sure if 1200Mhz will be a common OC for Grenada GPUs with proper cooling, but most Hawaii cards struggled to hit it, even with a decent cooling setup.

Even so, at the current price point, a GTX 980 only makes sense for those wanting lower power consumption. I'm sure the 390X overclocked pulls quite bit, vs. an overclocked GTX 980.

If I was buying based on the current prices, I'd personally reach for the R9 390X, as 100w or so, wouldn't make much difference to me.

390X is going to look like a poor buy when the regular Fury @ $550 comes out I think. But it'll probably be discounted by then.

 

[bryanW1995]

I would tend to agree that from marketing point of view it's rather a clever/smart move, however quite a bit cynical too.
On the other hand I presume that after debut of Fury Nano on the 400-450 dollars range, AMD will cut prices of 390x/390 by 70/50 dollars making them more reasonable.

I have seen no info at all on fury nano pricing (or performance for that matter). Are there further details out there that I have missed?

I'm questioning why everybody thinks that Nano will be so cheap. It seems to me that the card will be on par in value with the Fury Pro.

390X is going to look like a poor buy when the regular Fury @ $550 comes out I think. But it'll probably be discounted by then.

Man, I hope you're right. We could be looking at $350 or less for 980/3900x on July 17...or, depending on availability and how solid Fury Pro actually is, both camps could hold the line on current pricing.

 

[boozzer]

All in the eyes of the beholder. Perfect example.

certain pair of eyes are legally blind :awe:

 

[Innokentij]

So it preforms pretty much identical to the old 290x... at a higher price. Yeah, this card is useless. Just grab a 290(x) now while still available at way lower price or get a fury /980ti.

Got to agree here, people looking blindly at benchmark vs a stock cooled stock clocked 980 vs a OC card with a 3rd party cooler removing throttling. The sec u place it next to a MSI version of 980 it's nothing to be amazed at, the 8GB of vram is a gimmic since u cant do 4k with that card at 60 fps so duno. Will wait and see fury x. :\

 

[JDG1980]

The TechSpot power consumption measurements do seem to indicate that the "Antigua" rebrand is slightly more efficient than the original Tonga version, usually consuming about 12-15W less in most games despite the higher clocks. Whether this is due to a new stepping or just better binning is not clear.