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About LinkBacksRead more.Are the new GPUs much different from their predecessors?
Read more.Are the new GPUs much different from their predecessors?
Almost identical cards again? Seriously AMD, do you want to go out of business?
Rather a poor effort, AMD. The price hike from 290x to 390x looks outrageous.
I guess the 300 series is just filler until the Fury tech can filter down into an full range of cards and that these represent minor improvements because they blew all their budget on Fury?
To be fair to AMD, this fixes some of the odd discrepencies in their range (eg. 285 had 2gb of ram whilst 280 had 3gb) and 8Gb on top-end cards gives a nice bump over Nvidia's 4gb/6gb alternatives. With consoles featuring 8Gb combined RAM, one would tend to feel 4Gb should really be enough, but for 4k or large amounts of AA, or simply ultra-quality textures, then the extra room seems well worth having on top tier products. Shame about the pricing, though, which really needed to match previous generation to be truly competitive.
Also, not featuring GCN 1.1 top-to-bottom really is appalling. I know it hasn't caught on, but it makes a mockery of techologies like TrueAudio and Mantle when they cannot deliver technologies across the whole of their "non-budget" range after two generations.
They've all got Mantle I think, but I agree it's bad to mix up, and especially bad to have a higher numbered card have less features than a lower numbered in the same series.Originally Posted by Irien
Inevitable, but unsatisfactory all the same.
That said, I am liking what they've done with the 390/X, if the price normalises then they're a good set of cards.. but internal competition from the nano will be interesting to say the least.
They've more or less discontinued Mantle, suggesting that devs just adopt DX12 instead if I recall correctly.
As for the disappointing rebrand, **** have reviewed the MSI 390x, it's almost as good as the GTX 980. It looks like the coolers and PCBs have been completely re-engineered (or at least MSI's Twin Frozr card has had this treatment)
Edit: Uh... okay I'm not allowed to mention a certain three dimensional over clocking website...
So in short my current 290x which I just got cheap will be faster as I have it clocked at 1.11ghx and 6200mhxz on the ram. Yes I only have 4gb ram but I don't think this will be a problem for a good while.
Yes spot on, though a few games have used it and it's possible that it'll be handy for openGL games and those targetting Win7/8.
It presumably isn't faster than a similarly overclocked 390X though.
Yep, and I am similarly happy with my £120 R9 285 that I picked up a month ago.
I notice that Ebuyer have a 285 nearly as cheap atm, but who the heck is VTX???
Still, these are all time fillers until 16nm stuff hits the shelves. Even then I am seeing comments that 10nm is going to be the next golden node (like 28nm that went on for years). Once shrink products start appearing, AMD will need to pay for new dies across the board and that doesn't come cheap so I think I can let them off this rebrand if it gets us to the interesting stuff faster.
That overview points out that clocks and RAM size/speed have increased, but I notice the TDP has either stayed static or dropped so hopefully the "it burns like the sun" brigade will have less to shout about. OFC, we will all go and buy factory overclocked boards where the TDP goes straight out the window, but they seem to be trying.
Well as far as I can see it would perform exactly the same at the same clocks (within 4gb ram of course). I know in my case I haven't hit a temperature ceiling on my clocks and may be able to push it more.
Will be interesting to see how much headroom the 390x has on overclocking, by all means I am expecting it will be a little better than the 290x but for what I paid I am happy.
Yes I meant %wise. Higher freq/volt from a more mature chip yeild should give room to get to higher frequencies as you say, but I wouldn't swap out a 290X for one.
AMD really screwed up with the 290X reference cooler and it's been showing in benchmarks ever since then even though far superior aftermarket cooled cards exist. The point of this "rebrand" is to deal with the mistakes they made.
Looking at the benchmarks elsewhere, the 390X runs the 980 very close while power consumption is much closer. This card has to be considered in that capacity alone, as competition for the 980. Ditto with the 390 and 970, which at the same price still looks fairly good for the 970 imo, just on power.
The 8GB thing is to counter Nvidias bribing of the tech press over Fury X not having enough memory at ridiculous 8K resolutions. If that is the case there then AMD can point to it being the case at 4K with these cards too, right? Just pure nonsense from both camps.
The overall deal here is that there was no way AMD was ever making these cards a brand new design. HBM memory is too expensive currently to do a full new line-up of cards and they simply don't need the bandwidth yet. Had they designed a new arch for the 390X and below, they'd just be throwing it out next year for another new one on HBM.
Also, why no review here?
I'm just going to take UK prices of Scan because it's the easiest website to glance at the prices.
390X - £350 total rip off and not just based on being almost $140 ($556) more then the US prices. The 290X albeit 4GB versions were going for £225 for the last few weeks before they disappeared. If the performance of the cards is really as good as claimed they could really hurt nVidia if it was at least £50 cheaper.
The 390 is slightly better being only £70 more then the 290 was. Still could of been with being £10-£20 cheaper to undercut the 970.
On Ebuyer the 390X starts at £330, some £60 less than their cheapest 4GB 980
Their 390 cards start at £250, same price as their cheapest 970.
The 380 comes in at £156 which is £6 more than a 960
For first week out pricing that seems OK to me. Give it some days to settle, a week or two for Nvidia to do some price cuts, see how it pans out then.
Ebuyer still have some Asus direct cu II 290xs at £227 if anybody wants one before there gone.
Are the new cards at the 'new card premium' price to come down to proper levels in a few weeks/months.
MustardCutter (18-06-2015)
Those are slightly better prices (though I'm not touching XFX cards), I didn't look at Ebuyer as the site is normally a nightmare to navigate compared to Scan. I'm not even looking at buying right now so hopefully prices all round do drop a bit in the coming months.
If the 390X does match or come close to a 980 then the launch price is kind of alright, but when you are comparing them to the old cards they look dreadful prices.
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