Gadgetory

fractal venturi fans love radiators yes they do excellent welcome back everyone today I've got a graphics card review for you MSI's take on the AMD r9 390x the new GPU that requires you to use air quotes when you say new because let's be honest it's not really a new GPU it's a slightly more refined 290x I do actually have a couple AMD fury X cards which are new but you'll have to subscribe to see my upcoming video on that the r9 390x uses a Hawaii GPU based on 28 nanometer GCN architecture and aside from AMD changing the codename from Hawaii to Grenada eking out a little bit more clock speed on the GPU and a gddr5 and doubling the standard memory allocation from 4 gigabytes all the way up to 8 gigabytes there's not a ton of difference between the 290 X and the 390 X well actually there is the price at four hundred and thirty dollars this card sits right between nvidia gtx 970 and gtx 980 maybe a little bit too close to them at times which makes them nervous and uncomfortable should Nvidia be concerned let's find out now I think MSI deserves a lot of credit for design here on the gaming HG because this card looks beautiful from the edgy aggressive silhouette of the Twin Frozr 5 custom cooler to the sleek black back plates it's got the aesthetic chops to look nice and powerful in any high-end gaming system particularly if that gaming system is read in black of course MSI also designed their own custom PCB for this card which uses military class 4 components like solid caps and Superferry chokes to ensure long term lifespan and reliability I've been a fan of MSI's Twin Frozr coolers for quite some time and although we have seen version 5 here on a few other cards it does a very effective job at cooling and it's certainly not as long in the tooth as say in videos reference design that's been around since the original Titan you have two Torx fans with a special dispersion fan blade design which is basically designed to maximize airflow over the heatsinks what msi calls their super pipe technology which is a fancy way of saying that they've optimized the location of the heat pipes and the layout of the heat pipes to maximize cooling efficiency and of course the dense aluminum Finn are down there giving you flirtatious looks from behind the bread and black shroud now these two fans do not spin up at all until the GPU hits 60 degrees Celsius which MSI calls zero frozer and the fans can also spin independently of one another depending on where cooling is needed which msi calls hybrid frozer in practice this card never got hotter than about 77 degrees Celsius even with a bit of an overclock the fans do ramp up a touch at that temperature but the noise level was still very low and would barely be noticeable if it was installed in the case I was testing on an open test bed beyond the cooler though there is an 8 pin and a 6 pin peg connector for power no crossfire fingers because those are for poor people with Priya why e-cards they're not needed anymore although I guess I should point out that this is capable up to 4-way crossfire theoretically just keep in mind that this is a three slot cooler so probably two or maybe three Way will be the maximum number of this card that you will be able to fit in any one computer you've also got video outs on the video out n including two dual link DVIs a DisplayPort 1.2 and an HDMI 1.4 sorry no HDMI 2.0 here so stick to the DisplayPort out if you want 4k at 60 Hertz msi also brings their gaming app to the party and while I can't say I adore it as much as MSI's afterburner utility which you can of course still use to overclock this card manually the gaming app does have easy tuning buttons which enable preset OC gaming and silent modes that will bump up reduce the clock speed to give a bit more power or to keep things a bit quieter there's a max fan button which will give the card a blast of air for a few moments to cool it down quickly and you can also change between the different display color profiles to reduce blue light fatigue with the eye rest feature finally you have some control over the LED light on the card and you can switch between five modes there's flashing double flashing and random I can't really see myself using these personally but I will say that on breathing and off do seem useful to me let's run down the vital stats before we proceed to some benchmarks if you remember a couple minutes ago I said that the 390x memory amount has been doubled to eight gigabytes that's still on a 512 bit bus but it has been cranked up to 6000 megahertz effective speed and MSI turns that up a little bit more to 60 100 megahertz for an out-of-the-box 6.1 gigabits per second of available bandwidth the GPU clock speed for the 390 X was increased from 1,000 megahertz to 1050 megahertz MSI again goes beyond that with their custom card running at 1,100 megahertz in OC mode everything else remains pretty much the same as the 290x with 2,816 stream processors 176 texture units 64 our Opie's and 44 compute units for my benchmarking testbed I'm running an Intel 59 30k overclocked to 4.4 gigahertz 16 gigabytes of g.skill ripjaws for ddr4 memory at 2666 and EVGA x99 classified motherboard a Kingston HyperX savage 240 gigabyte SSD a Rosewill tachyon thousand watt power supply and Windows 8.1 64-bit I'll be comparing the msi r9 390x to the closest competition on the nvidia side the gtx 970 and gtx 980 from EVGA and since I have factory overclocked GPUs all around I'm going to just leave them at their out-of-the-box factory overclock speeds for testing and now here they are the benchmarks and those were benchmarks so based on the price point the 390x is performing right about where it should be it's beating out the 970 and pretty much every test and sneaking up just behind the 980 like fractal josh should well pretty much anywhere i guess the location doesn't really matter when fractal josh is sneaking it behind you on the plus side for the 390x though you've got performance it comes very very close to the gtx 980 and even beat it alone crysis 3 at least you've also got the sexy design in the backplate and a price that seems much more competitive than the 290x of last year more than the 290x in just a moment though on the minus side 8 gigabytes of gddr5 is nice but where you'll really need it which is 4k the GPU is going to lag behind I do have to wonder about the crossfire situation with this card though that could be interesting there's also the bulkier 2.5 or you might as well say 3 slot card design which is just larger than average and probably the biggest negative is that the power consumption is still high for this card I was heading around 500 watts of power draw maximum for the whole system with a 390 X whereas the 980 would only pull maybe 3 6 380 max ultimately I am just really torn about this car I mean it's sexy its powerful it's got tons of memory and it doesn't really put out too much noise the same time though the power draw is still pretty high and the 390 X can't be recommended for 4k gaming with graphics intensive titles at least making the eight gigs of gddr5 less useful it's nice to see that with some refinements the grenaded ship formerly known as Hawaii can nip at the 980 s coattails and even surpass it on occasion I will say this though if your GPU budget is around $400 and especially if you're gaming at 1440 which i think is a good resolution to be gaming at right now Nvidia doesn't really have an answer for the 390x unless power draw is a major concern for you the 390x can give you a lot of bang for your buck and I have no problem recommending MSI's take on it before you pull the trigger though do yourself a favor and check on the 290 X because they're selling for a lot less now and if you get a third-party design you can probably overclock it to magically make it at 390 X only with 4 gigs of memory instead of eight one last consideration is that AMD has recently enabled crossfire between the two ninety and 290 X and the 390 and 390 X so if you've already got one you maybe now have a few more crossfire options if you're looking to upgrade but let me know what you guys think of this card in the comments hit that like button while you're down in that general area and you can also check the description for links to my store for shirts and mugs and glasses my Amazon affiliate code link is also down there you can click on that before you buy things if you are awesome that's all for this video though ladies and gentlemen and as always thank you for watching