[Guru3d] MSI 390X Gaming 8G OC review

[TemjinGold]

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

But that's just it! If AMD priced it the way you said, it's far more likely for average Joe to think 290X = 390X and the like. By pricing it much higher, average Joe, who thinks price = quality, is actually far LESS likely to think the two cards are the same. And when you add in how 390X is way better than reference 290X, you now have the ticket to jettisoning the taint from the 290x line.

You can't discard your tarnished budget image by selling cheap. This price hike was a bold and gutsy move exactly for that reason. If it's about rebuilding image and not about selling cards, this is exactly what AMD needed.

 

[Actaeon]

Yea, Hawaii is one of the best chips AMD has produced the last years and they screw up with this damn cooler.

290/X should have been released as 390/X series today with custom coolers with 4GB and 8GB models.

Agreed. This thing was a Titan killer (literally and figuratively) when it was released and the fact Hawaii is nearly 2 years old now and still hangs with the top cards at competitive pricing is pretty incredible.

I am finally glad to see a review where Hawaii isn't gimped by the poor reference cooler. I found it way too common for people to cite comparison benchmarks of the 290x with the reference cooler in non-Uber mode with throttled clocks instead of using a 290X with a decent cooler like most people bought. Yes, AMD messed up with the crappy OEM cooler, but the benchmarks for that car wasn't representative of the cards you could actually buy or what the GPU was capable of.

I'm lucky in that I got my 290Xs last year when AMD was selling them at fire sales prices. I got the two Tri-Xs for about $300 each and got 8 free games with them. I overclocked them to 1100/6500 completely stable with no throttling, excessive heat, or any fan noise issues. Memory @ 6.5Ghz give me over 416GB/s of memory bandwidth. Over 15k Firemark points using an old Sandy Bridge.

Hopefully AMD cuts prices of these 390Xs when Fury is released. This card for $350~ will be a good deal for any one who missed out on the 290Xs last year.

 

[Silverforce11]

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.

The 285 was just crap. Slow, used a ton of power for its slowness and 2GB vram means it can't even play watchdogs or mordor at 1080p with ultra textures while a 280/X can.

Looks like a simple better binning, less vcore, higher clocks, done.

It's the same for the other cards, 290/X often have 1.25vcore which may have been required early on but mine are happy to run with a -50mv stock clocks. With the maturity of the process, they can get 1.2vcore with higher clocks.

 

[sam_816]

First it was wait for 16th and now wait for 24th wtf!!

 

[JDG1980]

You can't discard your tarnished budget image by selling cheap. This price hike was a bold and gutsy move exactly for that reason. If it's about rebuilding image and not about selling cards, this is exactly what AMD needed.

But that only works if you really do have competitive products. The Hawaii rebrands, in terms of pure performance, are comparable to the GTX 970 and GTX 980 respectively, but they use about twice as much power and have an inferior, outdated feature set compared to Maxwell (no HDMI 2.0, no hybrid HEVC decoding, fewer DirectX 12 features, VSR on GCN versions below 1.2 is inferior to Nvidia's DSR, etc.) Given all these disadvantages, trying to price them in the same ballpark is just not realistic. The market has said that Hawaii PRO cards are worth about $250, and Hawaii XT cards are worth $300-$320 at most. Overclocking them a bit and slapping on new labels won't change that.

 

[Silverforce11]

You seriously think with GCN being FL12 (& the extreme similarities of Mantle, designed for GCN, and DX12) and GCN in both major consoles, with GCN to be in Nintendo's upcoming console too... that makes GCN somehow outdated?

I would be be surprise if by year's end, GCN matures even further and it end up spanking the 980 like it did to Kepler.

Features like HDMI2 and HEVC matters to some, but if gamers don't need it (ie not gaming on 4K tvs), it won't make a difference to them.


Peak power has a large gap: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_radeon_r9_390x_gaming_8g_oc_review,8.html

But power consumption in games have a much smaller gap:

Peak power use is a good indicator for having a quality PSU that can handle spikes, but average power use matters more in the long run ($/heat).

 

[AnandThenMan]

but they use about twice as much power

10-20% is not twice as much stop posting nonsense.

 

[maddie]

10-20% is not twice as much stop posting nonsense.

The mods probably had to split the video card forums into sub-sections because of all the fighting occurring. Too much time spent investigating protests and issuing infractions, etc. After all, they work voluntarily and here are some of us adding to the workload.

Now we have a known one sided poster making these patently false claims of double the power consumption in the AMD section. One can only assume it is to cause conflict and disrupt the thread.

 

[Subyman]

This thread has touched just about every topic. This thread isn't to discuss "no one will buy a GTX 980 now" or "the 275 is bad" or "rebrands" or whatever else. Its about discussing the performance of this card and this particular review. Anyone going off topic again here will get an infraction.
Moderator Subyman