PowerColor PCS+ R9 390X 8GB

As some of you may know I won a recent competition ran jointly by OCUK and KitGuru to win a PowerColor Devil 13 dual core 390X.
Unfortunately it wasn’t comparible with my PC so I was offered two PowerColor PCS+ R9 390X cards as an alternative.


About PowerColor

PowerColor, established by Tul Corporation in 1997, is a graphics industry leading brand name now and well known for its outstanding performance and innovative technology. As a leading provider of graphics card, PowerColor offers powerful, reliable and cost-effective solutions to customers worldwide.


Specifications from the PowerColor website

Part Number AXR9 390X 8GBD5-PPDHE
Graphics Engine RADEON R9 390X
Video Memory 8GB GDDR5
Engine Clock 1060MHz
Memory Clock 1500MHz x4 (6.0 Gbps)
Memory Interface 512bit
DirectX Support 12
Bus Standard PCIE 3.0
Display Connectors DL DVI-D/ DL DVI-D/ HDMI/Display Port

Packaging and contents





The PowerColor 390X comes packaged in a black box displaying some of the features and system requirements.




It comes bundled with a driver disk, quick installation guide and a 6 to 8 pin power cable.


The card

The 390X is really an updated version of the 290X sharing the same Hawaii GPU and 2816 shaders but this one has 8GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1500 Mhz compared to the 290X which had 4GB clocked at 1250 Mhz.
PowerColor have two 390X models in their current line up and this one the PCS+ has a GPU clock of 1060 Mhz.



The display outputs consists of two DVI-D, a single HDMI and a single Display Port.




The cooling is provided by three fans and a large heatsink which runs the length of the card.
It features PowerColor Mute fan technology which means that the fans won’t come on providing a noiseless environment and reducing the power consumption when the GPU temperature is low than 60°C.




The PowerColor 390X has a black metal backplate with R9 390 Series printed on it in white, The power is supplied by means of an 8-pin and 6-pin connectors.


Test setup

Motherboard: MSI Z170A XPOWER Gaming Titanium Edition
Processor: Intel Core i7 6700K
Memory: Kingston Hyper X Predator 2 x 4GB HX426C13PB2K4/16 DDR4


Single card performance

Here are some results with the card running at the defaults clocks.

Fire Strike


Fire Strike Extreme


Fire Strike Ultra


Unigine Heaven Basic DX9


Unigine Heaven Xtreme DX11



Overclocking the 390X

To overclock the card I used Afterburner to achieve a stable 1200 Mhz GPU clock and 1700 Mhz on the memory.
A nice improvement in scores are seen in all the benchmarks.

Fire Strike


Fire Strike Extreme

Fire Strike Ultra


Unigine Heaven Basic DX9


Unigine Heaven Xtreme DX11



Dual 390X performance

Results at default speeds

Fire Strike


Fire Strike Extreme


Fire Strike Ultra


3DMark 11


3Dmark Vantage


Unigine Basic DX9


Unigine Heaven Xtreme DX11



Overclocking results

Fire Strike


Fire Strike Extreme


Fire Strike Ultra


3DMark 11


3DMark Vantage


Unigine Basic DX9


Unigine Heaven Xtreme DX11



Conclusion

Out of the box performance was good, the 390X ran very quiet and temperatures reached up to 65-70°C.
The card overclocked well and the triple slot cooler did a good job of keeping temps low but it was quite audible at full speed.

Both cards ran well together in crossfire and performance scaling was pretty good.
The card looks great, I particularly liked the black and silver colour scheme as it blended well with the Z170A Titanium Edition motherboard which I used.








PowerColor R9 390X 8192MB GDDR5 Graphics Card @ £319.99 available from OCUK

Thanks again to OCUK and KitGuru for providing the cards.

Very nice write up, topdog.

How did you find temperatures were affected when running the two cards together, and was that inside a case or in open air?

I didn't think the 390's memory clocked that well tbh, Good write up though

It was on a bench table Stu, there was plenty of space between the two cards so temps wasn't an issue, maybe inside a case things would be different as the hot air doesn't exhaust out through the back.

Great review. Those are nice looking cards, really like the backplate, every card should come with one as standard.

Gratz on the prize, lots of power on tap there.

Good review, what did you run before you won the 390X's?

Fantastic review lot's of testing and time must have been spent doing this.
I am a fan of powercolor but a lot of people don't tend to like them.
I don't want to put a negative on anything as your writeup is very well constructed, however my criticism would be that it was tested on an open bench and cf in a case would see higher temps and probably reduced clocks.
However doing it this way shows how much power x2 of these provide in crossfire when heat isn't an issue, so i'm glad you did test it open lol.

Thanks for your efforts.

How much faster is this than my overclocked windforce 780ghz edition @1440p is it a worth while upgrade ?.. i cant really justify a 980ti

@topdog555

Are you sure some of those graphics scores are right as they are beating 290Xs with much higher clock speeds and chillers/waterblocks for cooling.

Did you validate any of your scores with the Futuremark website ?

Great review, nice card

Nice work

Nice Review, Looks a decent card.

Great write up Dewi and a nice card by all accounts.

*snip*

I did't read this properly, nvm