Stick with AMD Radeon R9 390X or bite bullet and upgrade GPU now?

John has an AMD Radeon R9 390X and wants to upgrade, but the currently shortage is causing him some headaches.

Question by John from United Kingdom (Great Britain) | Answered by in Video Cards & GPUs on

Hi, I just picked up a Ryzen 7 3800X, ASUS Prime X570-P, 32GB of Viper Patriot 3600MHz DDR4, and Seagate NVMe. This is to replace my AMD FX 8350, GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD7, and Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz RAM.

My question is, I have an R9 390X that I was looking at upgrading for an NVIDIA RTX 3080 or Radeon 6800 XT. However, I am very put off by pricing at present.

Do you think it would be best to stick with my R9 390X until prices get back to normal or upgrade now to something slightly better and then upgrade later again to the card I want?

Hi John,

You are certainly right. Prices are out of control, and right now, there does not look to be an end in sight. Both NVIDIA and AMD have said we are looking at the middle of the year before things start to get better, and we can only hope that is true!

Stick with AMD Radeon R9 390X or bite bullet and upgrade GPU now? 1

Whether or not you decide to keep your 390X in the time being will mostly depend on your current resolution and the games you are playing. I would hazard to say the R9 390X will do perfectly fine in most scenarios at 1080p. It gets borderline around 1440p.

If you want a quick upgrade, I would look towards something that can give you at least a 10-15% performance increase. At a minimum, this would be cards like the GTX 1660 or GTX 980Ti. You should be able to find these on the used market rather inexpensive. Additionally, you could look even higher at cards like the 5600XT, Vega 64, or 5700XT, all of which can push 1440p pretty easily.

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