Whats the point

[3DVagabond]

Thanks. That's a good point.


I've seen just a bit, but even so, if you drive pretty much anybody's 290X card to 390X speeds there isn't much in the way of power savings here, especially given that better grade memory requires less power for the same speeds. With a card that's already so much more power hungry than the equivalent nVidia 970/980, do you really feel that "more power - but not quite as much more as you'd think" is a big selling point? Anyone that cares about the power is buying the nVidia cards, so while it's nice, seems more smoke than fire to me. Also, I read several reviews couple days ago and that was the general consensus, though granted with a couple outliers who were more impressed (though generally still calling them rebrands rather than refreshes.)

EDIT: Here's TechPowerUp's review of the MSI R9 290X Gaming card for comparison.http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/R9_290X_Gaming/22.html 231W versus 344W for average, 369W versus 424W peak. Doesn't seem like a refresh to me, although as LTC8K6 points out the term is irrelevant. It is what it is, and what it is is hungry.

Once again the TPU review is the MSI. MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8 GB
Here's a post by W1zzard about the Powercolor 390X PCS+

So I've benched power consumption of the PowerColor R9 390X PCS+ and I get:
Typical Gaming: 231 W
Peak Gaming: 253 W

Which seems to fall in line with what to expect.

Next, I shut down the system, removed the PowerColor card, installed the MSI card, booted up the system, ran power testing again, and the numbers in my review are confirmed.

MSI is running higher clocks, at higher voltage, and the card gets hotter. GPU temperature is a huge factor for power consumption, the hotter the GPU, the higher power draw, for doing the same thing.

Also I'm not starting my power consumption test from a cold card. I first do one run of about 2 minutes, then do another for which power is measured, which ensures you get realistic long-term gaming conditions, not just some magical numbers that don't apply to gaming.

Also, we are testing real card-only power consumption while many other sites test system power, this could also be a factor.

It might also be possible that the variation between Hawaii GPUs is very large and I got an unlucky sample. Let's just not hope that reviewers get low-power-picked cards and the high-power cards end up with customers.

GPU-Z ASIC Quality, MSI: 79.3, PowerColor 73.1

231W and 253W for typical and peak gaming. Same tester, same conditions, same system. 10MHz higher clocks I believe, 1090MHz vs. 1100MHz, but I can't find the exact spec for sure.

 

[werepossum]

Once again the TPU review is the MSI. MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8 GB
Here's a post by W1zzard about the Powercolor 390X PCS+

231W and 253W for typical and peak gaming. Same tester, same conditions, same system. 10MHz higher clocks I believe, 1090MHz vs. 1100MHz, but I can't find the exact spec for sure.

Agreed. I was posting the MSI 290X Gaming review to contrast with the MSI 390X Gaming review.