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HIS Radeon R9 390X IceQ X2 OC 8GB Video Card Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2015-07-17

We are indeed dealing with a refresh of the previous Hawaii XT GPU now baptized Grenada XT, featuring GCN 1.1, 6200 million transistors, 2816 shading units, 176 TMUs, 64ROPs and 44 Compute Units. The available VRAM is now 8GB instead of 4GB GDDR5 and now runs at higher frequencies than on 290X cards by default (1500MHz, 6000MHz effective); this surely helps when running multiple cards for a CrossFireX setup and using multiple monitors. Speaking of the frequencies, the defaults of the GPU on OEM cards have been raised to 1050MHz and with its pre-overclocked card HIS has added extra 20MHz.

Packaging, A Closer Look Part I

After reviewing the entire AMD 200 series last year, we are coming back to you guys with the fresh 300-series cards which were recently released by AMD. We will first begin with the 390X video card which sports twice as much VRAM as we have seen with the 290X and sports higher clocks, being based on the same architecture. In order to clean up the confusion, the product is based on the Hawaii GPU which was released back in October 2013 (GPU-Z also confirms this when having the card installed), but the revised version is now called Grenada and features some minor improvements. As expected, over time the yields became better and better and even if we are dealing with the same 28nm 438mm2 die, we will have better overclocking capabilities. We would like to say that this compares with the Haswell to Devils Canyon Intel CPUs which are basically the same but thanks to the improved manufacturing process, the overclocks got better and better.

As we have seen before, the memory is tied to a 512-bit bus, works now at 6GHz (effective data-rate) instead of 5GHz as we have seen with the R9 290X and while the AMD Radeon R9 390X OEM design was designed to run at 1050MHz, the HIS variant is overclocked even further at 1070MHz, hence the OC name.

Despite the fact that the card runs games at 4K while sporting a decent frame rate, HDMI is still 1.4a so if we use a TV we will only get 30FPS at this resolution, making the mouse cursor on the desktop sluggish.

Enough technical blabber! Let’s get the card in focus and see what we’ve got; right from the start, we will see that HIS is intending on convincing the user that the card will offer very good temperatures with their cooling system by displaying a suggestive box art:

Some of the supported technologies and card features are displayed on the frontal area as pictograms:

We will see more of the same on the side:

Also here we will be able to locate the box contents list:

On the opposite side we will get to find the system requirements:

If we would like to see the product main features in more detail, we are invited to check the back side of the box, which does exactly that:

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