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 |