The ASUS Radeon R9 390 STRIX Gaming 8GB is an extremely powerful R9 390 custom graphics card. The cooler on this particular card is amongst the most capable models available these days. Apparently, this combination sounds rather compelling, so we're interested to see what it can do in our review.


Presentation

ASUS is one of the most important AMD partners regarding their GPUs. If you've been following all the news and reviews in the past you might have noticed, that the 390 is actually a rebranded R9 290 with more VRAM. Basically This particular cards features 8 Gigabyte of GDDR5 memory in combination with a 512 Bit memory interface. Already in the past AMD cards were quick at 2160p (UHD / 4K), thanks to the wide memory interface as well as the fact, that there was 4 Gigabyte VRAM with all R9 290 as well as R9 290X cards. It looks like AMD is sticking to that legacy - providing more VRAM than their competitior - and we're certainly curious to find out in what extent this pays off or not.


As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, ASUS decided to use quite a tiny factory-overclock on the new Radeon R9 390 STRIX Gaming 8GB. While the reference Radeon R9 390 runs at 1000 MHz GPU clock ASUS bumped the frequency by 50 MHz to 1050MHz. A closer look at the memory reveals the AMD board partner runs it at stock speeds. Checking frequencies with 3DMark, we see that the card is not throttling on the GPU as well as the memory. In this case, GPU-Z is telling us that the GPU frequency reamains at 1050 MHz through the entire benchmark. This is also what we've noticed when running games, since there is no throttling whatsoever when running recent titles.

Specifications

	ASUS Radeon R9 390 STRIX Gaming 8GB	AMD Radeon R9 390 8GB	AMD Radeon R9 290 4GB
Chip	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XT	Hawaii XT
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	6.20 billion	6.20 billion	6.20 billion
GPU clock	1'050 MHz	up to 1'000 MHz	up to 1'000 MHz
Memory GDDR5	8'192 MB	8'192 MB	4'096 MB
Memory clock	1'500 MHz	1'500 MHz	1'250 MHz
Memory interface	512 Bit	512 Bit	512 Bit
Memory bandwidth	384'000 MB/s	384'000 MB/s	345'000 MB/s
TMUs	160	160	160
Shader Cores	2'560	2'560	2'560
ROPs	64	64	64
TDP	300 Watt	300 Watt	290 Watt
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	STRIX	AMD Reference	AMD Reference

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - Metro Last Light
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - Far Cry 4
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 15 - GTA V
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 16 - GRID Autosport
Page 7 - Battlefield 4	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Watch Dogs	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 9 - Tomb Raider	Page 19 - Performance Index & Price
Page 10 - Crysis 3	Page 20 - Conclusion