AMD Radeon 300-series explored

[jigger]

If we think about the current state of the semicondutor industry it's hardly a surprise the market has started to stagnate. Chip designs have been stuck at 28nm for 5 years+ with the promises of fixes for 20nm never happening and TSMC seeming to pander to Apple's every demand.

[ZaO]

A £215 for a R9 290X Vapor-X is a real bargain price and you should probably buy it quick smart if you are looking for a card in this kind of performance range.

The R9 290 have clearly been getting undersold and prices need to go up IMO. If I was in charge at AMD I would have not let the prices fall so low, because they really have been selling themselves short while Nvidia have been hugely overcharging for some time now.

Agreed! The Vapor-X is awesome. Super happy with mine

I see the point you make in the second bit, but, I prefer to praise Amd for giving us lower prices. It's a nice change from a world where the price of nearly everything seems to get pushed up all the time..

[gupsterg]

Agreed! The Vapor-X is awesome. Super happy with mine

I third that , I think I & iranu picked up the same Aria deal.

The Vapor-X 290X is @ 1100MHz GPU 6000MHz RAM with factory preset +31mV core voltage in bios.

It's only shy of 100Mhz on the RAM vs the current highest factory clocked 390X by MSI and I'm pretty sure it will reach that but not had the time to test plus RAM speeds have less effect than GPU speed in benches, due to the 512bit bus anyhow.

After reading the HardOCP review where they did clock to clock comparative of the of the MSI 390X to a XFX 290X I have no doubt I made the right decision to get the Vapor-X 290X.

Temps for VRMS (between 50-60C) are phenomenally low IMO, had over a hours worth of Crysis session last night and hit only 72c GPU on stock fan profile with that OC.

Already there is a modded 4GB of reference PCB 390X bios for the 290X on the web and some TPU members have flashed / installed 15.15 CCC and benched with no issues.

[watercooled]

@Tardiner: I know you'll have your hands full at the moment, but I've a suggestion for an article (slightly off-topic but this just reminded me).

Looking around the web, a couple of people are noticing Kepler performance isn't where it should be more recently, something which was quite obvious in Witcher 3 at least on release drivers. You could test to see the extent of this and e.g. if performance is actually degrading with drivers as some are suggesting. Using AMD cards as a reference point, it seems like whereas 780Ti was generally above 290X on release, the opposite is often true now. If course it could just be down to AMD's driver performance improving rather than Nvidia's degrading.

PC Per did something along those lines for AMD's 15.5 and 15.15 drivers, showing the performance improvement offered by the latest ones: http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-C...R9-390-Testing

[DanceswithUnix]

Seems that Charlie isn't a fan. Usually he saves rants that bad for Nvidia!

http://semiaccurate.com/2015/06/19/a...0-series-gpus/

[watercooled]

I'm confused as to why we still don't have full Tonga on desktop! As of now in the 300 series, there's no direct replacement for the 280X and a ~£100 gap.

[kalniel]

I'm confused as to why we still don't have full Tonga on desktop! As of now in the 300 series, there's no direct replacement for the 280X and a ~£100 gap.

There are usually two reasons for not releasing a product that you've R&D.

1) You're already doing so well that there's no reason to release a new part unless it reduces your B.O.M.

2) It's not going to sell/yield is prohibitive at competitive speeds.

One applies to Intel in the CPU space. The other...

[watercooled]

But they're selling the much larger Hawaii fully enabled and it has been sold with more shaders unlocked in some Apple systems. In doesn't really add up IMO.

Maybe Apple has some exclusivity deal on it? It's a long shot but I can't think of many other reasons.

However, it seems none of the 360/70/80 are using full dies. Along the lines of what Anandtech said it does allow for a less convoluted line-up, but instead of only using full dies where you're bound to end up with a ton of part dies you're not selling, you sell them all equally - yields must be extremely high for part-disabled dies on 28nm now. Large-volume parts like those on consoles typically have more cores than they ever have enabled for the same reason.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9387/a...n-300-series/2 Towards the bottom of the page.

[Xlucine]

There's a review of the Sapphire R9 390X almost finished.

The Cliff Notes version is that it's about 10 per cent faster than a stock R9 290X and just behind a stock GTX 980.

Guess I've been turning my 'Fury' to something else today.

[strikethrough]So no chance of us seeing the 390X review before the fury X release date hits?[/strikethrough]

Thanks!