XFX Radeon R9 390X official pictures prematurely posted

[HEXUS]

All but confirming this is a slightly faster R9 290X.

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[directhex]

So all this marketing pomp for the 300 series is for a 200 series rebadge?

[hairyonion]

Yes, but there are fury cards as well

[Badbonji]

The R9 390X from what I've read so far will be a R9 290X 8GB with higher clock speeds, the R9 390 looks like the R9 290X 4GB and the lower end 3XX cards will also be rebadged from previous architecture (which is okay, as long as they price them correctly - The R9 290X still holds its own).

The new flagship products will be the R9 Fury and R9 Fury X, which apparently have 4GB and 8GB of HBM respectively. What I was wondering was how there will be apparently 8GB of HBM, as the first generation was supposedly capped at 4GB.

[kalniel]

Oh. I'm disappointed.

[DemonHighwayman]

Very disappointing, I thought they had taken all this time to get a fresh new design out

[Jowsey]

It would be nice if they fleshed some of the lower ranges out with some GCN 1.3 silicon. Isn't the 7870 still in use as a 270x? That's still based off of GCN 1.0! That's the truly upsetting point atm. The 290x becoming the 390x was expected (well, that it would be called the 380x, but AMD wants a 'Named' flagship).

Also, I'm still very excited for the Fury range. Bring on the 16th!

[DanceswithUnix]

Oh. I'm disappointed.

I think 16nm products is the next time things get really shaken up, so this is pretty much what I was expecting.

People reacted with a great big "Meh" when the 285 came out, so I can't see why people are asking for a refresh on the rest of the range now. So they can go "meh" to them as well?

Anyone hoping for a price drop on the older products has probably missed the boat as well. A quick look on Ebuyer and Scan shows quite a small selection of cards 270 and up, the card I bought wasn't on offer for long.

TBH, I am more interested in what Alfa Romeo release on the 24th. Will it really be a baby Maserati?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I think 16nm products is the next time things get really shaken up, so this is pretty much what I was expecting.

People reacted with a great big "Meh" when the 285 came out, so I can't see why people are asking for a refresh on the rest of the range now. So they can go "meh" to them as well?

Anyone hoping for a price drop on the older products has probably missed the boat as well. A quick look on Ebuyer and Scan shows quite a small selection of cards 270 and up, the card I bought wasn't on offer for long.

TBH, I am more interested in what Alfa Romeo release on the 24th. Will it really be a baby Maserati?

Emm,CCL were only a few days ago selling various decent R9 290 cards for around £180.

[Jimbo75]

AMD was never going to do a complete new redesign of all their midrange and lower cards with HBM so expensive. That's coming next year. Had they made top-to-bottom new series this year they'd have to do it all over again for HBM.

The assumption was either (worst case) a direct rebrand of the 200 series or (best case) the same basic but slightly updated architecture manufactured at Globalfoundries for better perf/Watt. Based on the leaked prices at sweclockers, the 2nd option looks a bit more likely.

Also considering we now know Tonga is a 384-bit chip (which I suggested on release day here) and it should take the position at R9 380 or 380X, it's clear that these chips are faster than the current 200 generation. That said, they also need to have better power characteristics than they have, which is only likely to happen through a respin or very good binning of the chips.

[kalniel]

I think 16nm products is the next time things get really shaken up, so this is pretty much what I was expecting.

People reacted with a great big "Meh" when the 285 came out, so I can't see why people are asking for a refresh on the rest of the range now. So they can go "meh" to them as well?

I was hoping for a refresh like tonga to the rest of the range, ie 28nm products with GCN1.2, and for the 390/x to be the HBM cards. I presume tonga was designed to be scaled up/down just like their other chips, so I'm surprised it's only out in one card at the moment.

[shaithis]

I thought this is what we were all beginning to suspect anyway....

No surprises really, the big fuss will be regarding the 4k performance of Fury cards, if there is a fuss to be made over it.

[CK_1985]

So.... presumably the 'Fury' cards are going to sit above the 300-series in terms of price? Can't imagine there'd be any overlap for fear of sales cannibalisation.

So what we've really learned is that the Fury cards are going to be muchos expensive!

[kalniel]

So.... presumably the 'Fury' cards are going to sit above the 300-series in terms of price? Can't imagine there'd be any overlap for fear of sales cannibalisation.

So what we've really learned is that the Fury cards are going to be muchos expensive!

Yes, extremely. I was hoping they'd just be a halo tier like Titan.

[scaryjim]

I was hoping for a refresh like tonga to the rest of the range, ie 28nm products with GCN1.2, and for the 390/x to be the HBM cards. I presume tonga was designed to be scaled up/down just like their other chips, so I'm surprised it's only out in one card at the moment.

There was an Apple-OEM-only mobile card based on Tonga, with the full 2048 shaders but a 256bit memory bus. Presumably the feeling was that the extant cards were doing the job well enough, and they wanted one card out there to test the delta colour compression before they rolled it into the main body of the products? Much like they did with the 4770 to test 40nm before moving an entire range to it.

I believe current feeling is that we'll see the existing 285 moved up to the R9 380, with a full enabled Tonga part filling out the R9 380X slot. It's a little dissapointing, given just how long AMD have spun out the first round of GCN cards, but I can't say I'm surprised. Perhaps they'll roll out a cut-down verion of Tonga (~1536 shaders and a 256bit bus?) to fill out the R9 370-range? If they literally just rebrand the 7850/7870 again that'll be very disappointing.

So.... presumably the 'Fury' cards are going to sit above the 300-series in terms of price? Can't imagine there'd be any overlap for fear of sales cannibalisation.

So what we've really learned is that the Fury cards are going to be muchos expensive!

Leaked priced for the water-cooled Fiji-XT-based R9 Fury X is $849. So yes, pretty damn expensive, but cheaper than the Titan X. Not forgetting it's a flagship card, and we currently have no idea what the performance will be like. if it's $849 but wipes the floor with a Titan X, it won't look such a bad deal. If it struggles to beat a 980 Ti, it'll look overpriced.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Tonga is confirmed to have a 384 bit memory controller,so I expect a fully enabled one will be quite close to an R9 290 at 1080p.

Edit!!

It looks like the R7 370X is using the same Pitcairn core as the R9 270X and R9 270 but with a shorter PCB and improvements to performance/watt:

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r7-37...pin-connector/