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It's an excellent example of how competition drives performance. When Nvidia's GTX 970 arrived, the high-end graphics card market was blown apart. Factory overclocked examples traded blows with Nvidia's prior flagship - the GTX 780 Ti - and performance could be pushed further, bringing it into line with the top-end GTX 980. AMD's Radeon R9 290 and 290X suddenly looked excessively expensive and rather mediocre. Almost a year on and the red team has responded well: it has its limitations, but the performance can't be denied - the new R9 390 8GB is indeed faster than the GTX 970.AMD's formula for challenging Nvidia's top-end cards is simple enough. The existing Hawaii chips used in R9 290 and 290X are utilised here, receiving an overclock to the GPU core, while the GDDR5 memory modules are replaced with faster, more capable parts with 500gbps of additional bandwidth. It's a simple recipe for success that extracts just enough additional performance on the Radeon R9 390X to make it a contender in its price range, and the formula is arguably even more effective on the R9 390, delivering impressive results up against the GTX 970.
In essence then, the performance is there but it comes at a cost: the Hawaii chip now generates even more heat than it did previously, meaning quite remarkable levels of power consumption. Secondly, dissipating that heat requires a substantial cooling assembly. For our R9 390 8GB review, we're assessing the new Asus DirectCU 3 model - the top-end cooler the company produces, based on top-of-the-line components and boasting beautiful build quality. In fact, it's the exact same set-up used on the firm's R9 Fury card, the difference being that the less capable R9 390 actually produces more heat than AMD's slightly cut-down flagship.
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