SAPPHIRE Tri-X Radeon R9 390X 8GB Video Card Review

Introduction

SAPPHIRE is one of the biggest partners of AMD when it comes to video cards, so it's no surprise they have a kick ass Radeon R9 390X out of the gate. SAPPHIRE has worked closely with AMD for a number of years, with a gigantic range of video cards based on AMD's GPUs.

The latest flagship video card from SAPPHIRE is their new Tri-X R9 390X, an AMD Hawaii-based GPU video card. SAPPHIRE has slapped 8GB of GDDR5 onto the card, so we've used SAPPHIRE's Tri-X R9 290X with 8GB to compare the new Tri-X R9 390X against. This will give you the best example of the performance of SAPPHIRE's new video card, and whether it's something you should upgrade to, or buy.

Quick Specs

The Radeon R9 390X is virtually identical to the Radeon R9 290X that it is essentially a rebranding of the old product. AMD has pushed the VRAM up to 8GB on the 390X however, as well as tweaking the GPU and RAM clocks.

SAPPHIRE has its Tri-X R9 390X clocked slower than the MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8G we tested before this, with the GPU clocked at 1055MHz (versus 1100MHz on the MSI card) and the 8GB of GDDR5 is clocked at 6GHz (1500MHz x 4). This provides the SAPPHIRE Tri-X R9 390X with 384GB/sec of memory bandwidth over its 512-bit bus.

The Radeon R9 390X still features the same 2816 stream processors, 76 TMUs, 64 ROPs and 28nm process carried over from the R9 290X. The card is ready for DirectX 12, has support for AMD's FreeSync, EyeFinity and LiquidVR technologies. Note that the Radeon R9 390X, while it is a brand new card, only supports DirectX 12. NVIDIA has support for DirectX 12.1 in all of its 900 series, including the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti, and Titan X.

Availability & Price

AMD is pricing the Radeon R9 390X with 8GB of VRAM at around $399-$429 depending on the brand. You'll find some retailers pricing them higher than $429, but be sure to shop around before clicking the buy button. This means you're paying around a $100 premium for the 390X with 8GB of RAM, compared to the 290X with 4GB of RAM which you can find for $329 or so.