Card Layout and Photos
So as it turns out the angular design on the packaging for the XFX R9 390 DD was a hint at wat came inside of the box. Moving o the 300 series they redesigned their fan shroud to have that same shape. I will be honest when I say I feel like they are regressing a little at a time. With the 7000 series XFX had a crazy but very unique design that helped them stand out and oozed quality. For the 200 Series launch they dropped the metal fan shroud and went with a great looking blacked out design with a glowing XFX logo. This new design, while still decent looking, doesn’t compare to their previous designs in my opinion. We do still get the dual fan design but this design loses the business formal look of the older cards and isn’t as bold as the 7000 Series. The one thing that we do have going on is an all-black design that should match any build you want to put it in. The card isn’t as long as the Sapphire 390 but it is still really tall, almost an inch over the top of the PCI slot. Oddly enough they didn’t seem to use that space to get even larger fans in even though there is room.
The fans on the 390 DD Core have nine curved blades and a very glossy finish. In the middle they put silver covers with the XFX logo on them. This silver is a little weird with the rest of the card being all black, I would love for the stickers to be black with silver XFX logos to help keep things consistent.
From the end of the card we can get a better look at the cooling design under the fans and fan shroud. We can see five copper heatpipes running through a heatsink that is about ¾ inch thick. This pulls the heat out over the whole heatsink to help both fans cool things down. The heatsink fits very tight up against the caps at the end of the card as well. With the open end and bottom design and with the fans blowing down against the PCB we know that nearly all of the heat from the card will vent into the case, not out of the back of the card like most reference designs work.
Up on the top edge we have that same open design, in fact we can see most of the heatsink and the heatpipes where they turn to run over the GPU. The top edge of the fan shroud does have the XFX logo embossed into the textured shroud. We also can see that there is no need for crossfire bridges as well. Down at the end we have two power plugs. One is an 8-pin and the other is a 6-pin, XFX didn’t go the direction everyone else has been with flipped power plugs. So the clips on the power plugs are on the heatsink side and they didn’t really leave any room to get at them. When testing the card I had a lot of trouble getting my fingers down in there to unplug the cables each time.
I love that XFX didn’t follow everyone else as far as connections go. They kept the dual DVI ports with a full HDMI and full DisplayPort. Most cards have moved to just one DVI port and a lot more DisplayPorts. While my personal setup has a few DisplayPort monitors, most people haven’t moved that direction from my experience. The rear slot also has the XFX logo cut into the vent as well like XFX cards from the past few generations.
The rear of the card has a full length backplate. The backplate has round holes for ventilation over most of the back but they did manage to fit a bright white XFX logo on the back in the proper orientation for it to look correct when installed in your PC. The backplate is also careful to have a cutout that still lets us see the serial number sticker on the PCB as well. My only complaint here are the bring white circles around the four mounting points, I’m not sure why they needed to highlight them so much, especially with it cutting into the mostly blacked out design to do it.
