Early this month it seemed like we had nothing but video card content, at one point out entire front page was filled with it. Because of that I did take a bit of a break from them but I did have one last card here in the office I wanted to take a look at. This time around I wanted to take a look at an MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G that AMD had sent over. We have seen a few R9 390’s but nothing from MSI so it will be great to see how the 390 compares to some of the SLI and Crossfire testing we recently did and to also see how the MSI card compares to the other competition on the market.

Product Name: MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G

Review Sample Provided by: AMD

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Amazon Link: HERE

 

Specifications
Graphics Engine AMD Radeon™ R9 390
Bus Standard PCI Express x16 3.0
Memory Type GDDR5
Memory Size(MB) 8192
Memory Interface 512 bits
Core Clock Speed(MHz)

1060 MHz (OC Mode)

1040 MHz (Gaming Mode)

1000 MHz (Silent Mode)

Memory Clock Speed(MHz) 6100 (OC Mode) / 6000
Maximum Displays 3
DVI Output 2 (Dual-link DVI-D), Max Resolution: 2560 x 1600 @60 Hz.
HDMI-Output

1 (version 1.4a)

Max Resolution: 4096x2160 @24 Hz (1.4a)

DisplayPort

1 (version 1.2)

Max Resolution: 4096x2160 @60 Hz

Power consumption (W) 275
HDCP Support Y
HDMI Support Y
Dual-link DVI Y
Power Connectors 6 pin to 8 pin Power cable
Display Output (Max Resolution)

DL-DVI-I/HDMI

DisplayPort x3

Accessories 6-pin x 1
RAMDACs 400
DirectX Version Support 12
OpenGL Version Support 4.4
Crossfire Support Y
Card Dimension(mm) 277 x 129 x 51
Weight 1312

 


Packaging

The packaging for the R9 390 Gaming 8G sticks with the same black and red theme that MSI has been using on all of their gaming series cards. The front of the box has a black background with a circuit board print on it. There is a large dragon logo (the gaming series logo) that takes up most of the front. They also have the gaming series badge up in the top right with the same dragon on it again. For branding the model name is down in the bottom right area with the MSI logo up in the top right corner as well. Beyond that the front just has a few small badges that show that it is an 8 GB card that runs on PCI Express 3.0 and it is an overclocked card.

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On the back MSI included three photos that highlight key features like the Torx Fans, Zero Frozr cooling, and the included Gaming APP. Beyond that they have a very short and general specification listing and a feature list as well. I would love if they fit a full picture of the card somewhere on the front or back but oh well.

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Inside the card comes wrapped up in a static protective bag like always and then it sits in a thick foam tray with a cutout for the card to fit into. On top of the card they keep all of the documentation and the driver/software disc. Specifically you get a quick user guide and a paper on MSIs gaming series. For accessories they only include the one eight to six pin power adapter and that comes in the pull out cardboard box in the foam. The adapter uses all red wiring and then black connectors and sleeving to match the same theme as the card.

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Card Layout and Photos

Coming from all of the GTX 950’s and R7 370’s that I have covered recently the R9 390 Gaming 8G seems huge. When compared to the other 390’s that we have covered the card is about the same size though with the only difference being the MSI card is a taller. It is taller to fit the two huge Torx fans tha take up most of the cooler. The two fans are glossy black and leave just a little room for the red and black fan shroud that helps direct the air down over the Twin Frozr cooler. The fan shroud is a little unique because the entire left side is all red and the right side is black with red highlights. The shroud is different than older MSI gaming cards because they have gone to a plastic shroud over the older cards with a metal shroud, but going plastic allowed them a little more flexibility on styling.

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When we get a look at the 390 Gaming 8G from the top and bottom we can get a better idea of the card size as it is slightly thicker than two PCI slots. We can also see just how their Twin Frozr cooler works as well. I was really surprised at just how thick the heatsinks are, they really packed all the cooling power they could, I’m really curious to see how the cooling performance works out. With the two fans blowing down towards the PCB in order for MSI to get all of that air out the fan shroud is almost completely open on the top, bottom, and end of the card. This means the warm air coming off the card will be going into your case, but this is how all of the non-reference cards are these days.

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Taking a look at the amount of card above the top of the PCI slot we can get a better idea of the overall height. The 390 Gaming 8G will require almost an inch of clearance so make sure you keep that in mind when selecting a case.

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For power the R9 390 Gaming 8G requires one eight pin power connection and one six pin power connection. To make room for a large heatsink MSI did flip those two connections around backwards and notched the PCB for the locking clip as well as notching the rear backplate to help get at them. If you look at the photo below you can see just how tight they were able to get the heatsink up against the connections when not having to worry about leaving finger room to get at the locking clip.

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For display connection options on the back the R9 390 Gaming 8G comes with the “older” standard of two DVI ports as well as an HDMI and a DisplayPort. Most of the newer high end cards have dropped a DVI in favor of being able to pack in three DisplayPort connections. I still think that this move is a little early because most people I know aren’t running anything DisplayPort, but on a card like this where it is a little higher end it is a lot more likely to see people looking at new displays that use DisplayPort, especially with people slowly moving to higher resolutions and getting features like FreeSync (that this card also supports).

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The back of the R9 390 Gaming 8G is covered in a full aluminum backplate. MSI slipped I a little of their dragon theme with a black dragon painted onto the backplate as well as a small MSI logo that will face out when looking in through a side panel window. The backplate does have a lot of holes drilled into it for ventilation and I’m happy to see it. A lot of manufactures have been moving away from them because they can sometimes raise temperatures and cause fitment issues in multi card configurations but I do think they add a lot to the overall quality and strength of a card. Not to mention cards look a lot better with a nice backplate on them!

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Our Test Rig and Procedures

Our Test Rig
CPU Intel i7-3960X Live Pricing
Memory Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM Quad Channel  (4x4GB) Live Pricing
Motherboard Asus Rampage IV X79 Motherboard  Live Pricing
Cooling Intel Active Thermal Solution RTS2011LC Live Pricing
Power Supply Cooler Master Gold Series 1200 Watt PSU Live Pricing
Storage Kingston Hyper X 3K 240GB SSD Live Pricing
Case High Speed PC Test Bench Live Pricing
Our Testing Procedures
3DMark The same goes for the most current version of 3DMark using the Fire Strike benchmark in normal, extreme, and ultra settings
Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 Using the “Extreme” preset
Unigine Valley Benchmark 1.0 Using the Extreme HD preset to get an average FPS
Bioshock Infinite  Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Bioshock Infinite on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, FXAA turned on, Ultra Texture detail, 16x Aniso Texture Filtering, Ultra Dynamic Shadows, Normal Postprocessing, Light Shafts on, Ambient Occlusion set to ultra, and the Level of Detail set to Ultra as well. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.
Tomb Raider Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Tomb Raider on the “Xtreme” quality setting. This has a resolution of 1920x1080, Exclusive Fullscreen turned on, Anti-Aliasing set to 2xSSAA, Texture Quality set to Ultra, Texture Aniso set to 16x Aniso, Hair Quality set to TressFX, Shadow set to Normal, Shadow Resolution on High, Ultra SSAO, Ultra Depth of Field, High Reflection quality, Ultra LOD scale, Post Processing On, High Precision RT turned on, and Tessellation is also turned on.  We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.
Hitman: Absolution Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Hitman: Absolution on the “Xtreme” quality setting other than the MSAA setting is turned down from 8x to 2x. That setting puts the resolution at 1920x1080, MSAA is set to 2x, Texture Quality is set to High, Texture Aniso is set to 16x, Shadows are on Ultra, SSA is set to high, Global Illumination is turned on, Reflections are set to High, FXAA is on, Level of Detail is set to Ultra, Depth of Field is high, Tessellation is turned on, and Bloom is set to normal. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above, except on the “high” setting.
Sleeping Dogs Using the Adrenaline Action Benchmark Tool we run Sleeping Dogs on the “Xtreme” quality setting. That means our resolution is set to 1920x1080, Anti-Aliasing is set to Extreme, Texture Quality is set to High-Res, Shadow Quality is High, Shadow Filter is set to high, SSAO is set to High, Motion Blur Level is set to High, and World Density is set to Extreme. We also run this same test at 2560x1440 using the same settings as mentioned above.
F1 2014 We use the built in benchmark for F1 2014. We use the Ultra setting and then test at 2560x1440 and 1920x1080
Total War: ROME II Ultra setting tested at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, built in forest benchmark
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor Using the built in benchmark we test with ultra settings at 1440p
Sniper Elite 3 Ultra setting tested at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, built in benchmark
GRID Autosport Ultra setting tested at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, built in benchmark
Theif Tested using the “Very High” setting at 1920x1080 and 2560x1440
Folding @ Home Using the Folding @ Home benchmark we test both single and double precision using the explicit result
Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmark
Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 heat testing We run through Unreal Heaven using the “Extreme” preset for 30 minutes to test in game cooling performance.
Power Usage Using Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0, we get our “load” power usage number from the peak power usage during our test. We get our numbers from a Kill-A-Watt connected to the test benches power cord.
Noise Testing Our Noise testing is done using a decibel meter 3 inches away from the video card on the bottom/fan side of the card. We test an idle noise level and then to get an idea of how loud the card will get if it warms all the way up we also turn the fan speed up to 50% and 100% and test both speeds as well. The 100% test isn’t a representation of typical in game noise levels, but it will show you how loud a card can be if you run it at its highest setting or if it gets very hot.

 


Synthetic Benchmarks

To start off our testing I like to go with out synthetic benchmark suite. Here we don’t see real world performance, but generally the tests all do a great job of being consistent and being able to compare the numbers between cards. So here I wanted to see how well the 390 Gaming 8G would perform compared to the other R9 390’s as well as the GTX 950 SLI that I recently tested. I started first with 3DMark where we can test the card at 1080p, 1440p, and then 4k to get a look at the entire range of performance. The MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G performed well pulling out a slight edge over the other two R9 390’s that were tested in all three tests. It also had a few hundred on the 950’s in SLI in the performance and extreme benchmarks. When the resolution was cranked up in the ultra benchmark the 950’s fell on their face and the 390 Gaming 8G pulled way ahead. The slight increase in performance for the MSI did put us a little close to the GTX 980 reference card as well. In Unigine Heaven Benchmark the results were very similar to the performance test in 3DMark with the 950’s in SLI getting close but not being able to overtake the MSI 390. The gap here between the 390 and the GTX 980 was a lot bigger though. In the Valley Benchmark the gap was much closer (less than 2 FPS).

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In-Game Benchmarks

As always the synthetic benchmarks are great and all, but the real meat and potatoes is in the in gaming testing. The only reason most of us even get dedicated video cards is to play our games at the best possible settings. So to get an idea of how the 390 Gaming 8G performs I ran it through our in game benchmark suite of nine different games. I also test nearly all of those games at both 1080p and 1440p to see how the card handles both resolutions. To make things a little easier to consume, in addition to the full graphs I also break down the performance results from all of the tests into three categories, under 30 (unplayable), over 30 (playable), and over 60(ideal performance). This way we can quickly take a look at where the card stands at each resolution. So, how did the 390 Gaming 8G do? Well at 1080p there weren’t any surprises when the card blasted through all of the games at over 60 FPS. The 1440p results were a little more interesting. You can expect the card to be able to play any game you throw at it at that resolution, but for a little over half I saw frame rates that were playable but not perfect, so if you are sensitive to having frame rates below 60 you will need to turn the settings down a little lower than what I test at (completely cranked).

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So we know how did the 390 Gaming 8G compare to the competition in the in game testing? Well in most of the tests it was over the other R9 390’s and just a little below the GTX 980, just like in our synthetic benchmarks. I did see a few anomalies though. In GRID for example all of the 390’s performed well below my expectations but the MSI was even at the bottom of that. I think this is a recent driver issue because even the R9 380 and R9 380 that were tested well in the past performed better. The test has always favored Nvidia cards but there is even more at play here considering the drop in performance over time.

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Compute benchmarks

To round out the performance testing I also ran the R9 390 Gaming 8G through our compute benchmarks as well. Here we can get an idea of how the card will help with performance in non-gaming applications. The first tests were using Folding at Home’s benchmark. In the single precision test the MSI pulls a very respectable 56.9408 putting it just slightly above the other 390’s but still leaves a big gap between it and the GTX 980. In the double precision benchmark though the tables are completely turned with the MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G all the way at the top of the charts. Nvidia has been cutting double precision performance on their cards to prevent cannibalization of their Quadro cards for a few years now and because of that the AMD cards really shine. The last benchmark uses Cinebench’s OpenGL benchmark to render a video. The resulting average FPS is the benchmark result. Here the Gaming 8G outperformed the other 390’s but came in even below the GTX 950’s.

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Cooling, Noise, and Power

For the rest of my testing I focused on tests that don’t really show in game performance but are extremely important to the overall card performance. Here I take a look at the overall power consumption, cooling performance, and noise levels. To start that testing I jumped into power consumption where I tested the peak wattage pulled using both the Unigine Heaven and Valley benchmarks, we are moving away from the Heaven benchmark as the new Valley benchmark puts the card under a bigger load. This way you can get an idea of what the 390 Gaming 8G will pull under average gaming condition. Obviously this isn’t the max peak you will see as some games could pull a little more, but it helps get a good idea of what power supply you might need. So how did it do? Well it toped the charts in both test for the most power pulled for a single card. Sadly, this is one of the few times that being at the top of the charts isn’t a good thing, the MSI pulls a LOT of power, especially when compared to the GTX 980 that it competes with in a lot of performance benchmarks. Pulling a lot of power isn’t a deal breaker in most cases, but do keep it in mind when picking out your power supply.

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My next test was to see just how much noise those two large Torx fans would put out. To do this I tested at 100% fan speed for a max noise level and then again at 50% fan speed for a more realistic result. Idle testing wasn’t needed because the 390 Gaming 8G turns both of its fans off when not under heavy load. So how did it do? Well at 100% fan speed it was in the bottom half of our charts meaning those two extremely large fans put out more noise than most when cranked up. The 50% fan speed result was a lot better but still one of the loudest tested. I didn’t notice the noise when testing at all but the downside to having such large fans is obviously a little more noise.

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Going into our last test I was a little unsure how things would turn out. I mean on one hand the 390 Gaming 8G pulls more power than anything else we have tested and we know that more power draw means more heat. On the other hand, the card does have that extremely thick Twin Frozr heatsink and the two Torx fans. In the end it the two things washed each other out and the card came in right about average. This was still noticeably warmer than the other 390’s tested but also better than a reference card would do.

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Overall and Final Verdict

After putting the R9 390 Gaming 8G through all of our testing and taking a closer look at its features what do I think of the card? Well for starters I really like the styling of the card. I felt like the other 390’s that I have testing were a little bland and in the case of the XFX a little unusual in the styling department so the bright color scheme of the Gaming 8G was a nice change and it looks sharp. The card is a little big though, especially on the height where the MSI is a little under an inch taller than the top of the PCI slot but also because the cooler sticks out making this a 2 and a half slot card. MSI also slipped in a backplate on the Gaming 8G where the other 390’s didn’t come with them adding to the overall strength and quality of the card.

As for its performance, the 390 Gaming 8G dominated in our 1080p testing and also didn’t run into any games that it couldn’t run with the settings cranked at 1440p. In all of the tests it was a little faster than the other 390’s that I tested inching it a little closer in performance to the GTX 980. Obviously because it was closer to the GTX 980 did mean that it out performed the GTX 970 in almost every situation. When it came to the tests that depended more on the MSI features it did struggle though. For one it pulled a crazy amount of power, almost 140 watts more than the GTX 980 and more than the other 390’s as well. This translated to more heat in the cooling testing as well and also required the use of the large fans that make the card taller and were a little on the noisy side.

So what about the price? Well that is where things start to get really interesting. With the MSI 390 Gaming 8G and most of the other R9 390’s priced near $329.99 all of the comparisons we did earlier to the Nvidia cards get a little weird. Remember that for the most part the R9 390 ran just below the GTX 980 reference card. It was obviously not faster, but it was a lot faster than the GTX 970. Well when we take into account the price the GTX 970 that sells for as low as $279.99 isn’t looking like that good of a deal. Especially when you look at the R9 390’s performance compared to the $459.99 GTX 980. Basically at this price point it is really hard to justify the GTX 980 and the R9 390 looks like a good value for its performance.  

fv4value

Live Pricing: HERE

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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