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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
