Card Layout and Photos
With the 200 Series Sapphire introduced a completely new cooling design with aggressive fan shrouds that had bright colors like orange and blue that showed exactly what model you were running. With the 300 Series they have once again made big changes in their coolers, they did keep some of the colors but they have limited the colored area to a small strip on the top and bottom of the card. This lets people like me who love orange have their orange without making it too much for people who want a muted build. For the Nitro cards they went with a mostly blacked out design with just a silver strip on the top and bottom edge. The Nitro R9 390 is a HUGE card, Sapphire really went crazy trying to pack as much cooling into this card as they could. The card has a 10mm heatpipe design that pulls the heat off of the GPU and out over the 12.1 inch long cooler.
To cool down that large heatsink they packed in three large fans. The fans are actually taller than a standard video cards height so if you look they had to go a little taller on the card up over the top edge of the PCI slot. This does mean that some cases might have issues with the card, so keep that in mind. The three fans are a dual ball bearing design to hopefully keep things quiet and to prevent wear issues later in its life.
Having an aftermarket cooling design does mean that the card will push almost all of its heat into your case unlike most reference designs. The end of the Nitro is semi closed but there are openings for things to vent. This also gives us a look at the heatpipes as well. The bottom of the Nitro is nearly completely open as well.
Up along the top edge of the Nitro we can get a peek at the cards heatsink due to what is almost like a window in the fan shroud. There are a few other things going on up here though. For starters, just like the R9 290, the R9 390 doesn’t require Crossfire bridges to run multiple card configurations anymore. That opens up more room for the heatsink and also for Sapphire to include their vBIOS button that turns on a UEFI helps unlock features on Windows 8.1 and the upcoming Windows 10. For power connections we have two full 8-pin connections were we would normally see an 8-pin+6-pin configuration on most other high end cards. Both plugs are flipped backwards, something that Asus originally introduced, this flips the lock clip on the cable to the back of the card and lets Sapphire have more room for the heatsink rather than having to plan around fingers being stuck down in there to unplug a cable.
For display connections Sapphire went with what is now the standard setup. You get three full sized DisplayPort connections for running multi monitor setups. For those who don’t have monitors that support DisplayPort yet you also get an HDMI as well as a DVI. I would prefer a second DVI personally but they take up so much space that it would eliminate the small vent that you get.
The back of the R9 390 Nitro shows off its black PCB. Back here we can also better see just how much larger the cooler is than the PCB on the top an especially on the end of the card. Sapphire decided to not go with a backplate this time around. I prefer the styling that a backplate adds but they do make things a little tight sometimes, especially in Crossfire configurations.
