PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB Video Card Review
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
Going into this review we were expecting the ‘new’ AMD Radeon R9 390X video card to perform slightly better than the ‘old’ AMD Radeon R9 290X and that is exactly what we discovered after completing our performance testing. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone as the two cards share the same GPU and are basically differentiated by their clock speeds and the amount of memory they have. The PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB video card appears to have benefited from the larger 8GB frame buffer in a couple of our game tests. While this is exciting there are AMD Radeon R9 290X 8GB models that have been on the market for months, so nothing here is too amazing. The initial group of AMD Radeon R300 series cards are updates to the older Radeon R200 series cards.
Overclocking performance on the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB was decent, but we were unable to match the GPU core clock that we could reach on the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB. That was a little disappointing, but every card overclocks differently and the very next card off the assembly line could have been better!
| PowerColor PCS+ R9 390X | PowerColor PCS+ R9 290X | |
| GPU | AMD Hawaii | AMD Hawaii |
| Stream Processors | 2816 | 2816 |
| GPU Clock | 1060 MHz | 1050 MHz |
| Pixel Fillrate | 67.8 GPixel/s | 67.2 GPixel/s |
| Texture Fillrate | 186.6 GTexel/s | 184.4 GTexel/s |
| Memory Amount | 8GB GDDR5 | 4GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 512-bit | 512-bit |
| Memory Clock | 1500 MHz | 1350 MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 384.0 GB/s | 345.6 GB/s |
| Warranty | 2-Years | 2-Years |
| Release Date | June 2015 | January 2014 |
| Launch Price | $449.99 | $649.99 |
| Street Price | $449.99 Shipped | $309.99 Shipped |
When it comes to pricing you are looking at $449.99 shipped for the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB. That price doesn’t sound bad at first, but you can go over to Newegg and purchase last years PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB video card for $309.99 shipped after a $20 rebate. We are fully aware that the Radeon R200 series cards are no longer being produced and once inventories are depleted that they’ll be gone, but we really like the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB video card that we reviewed last year for $310! AMD and PowerColor will cringe when they read that, but if you are gaming on a single 4K display on the game titles that are out now the 290X 4GB card is still a viable option while they can still be found. Keep in mind that both the 290X and 390X both cost much less than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 that it performed somewhat closely with as that card runs $514.99 shipped after a $20 rebate.
Here is how pricing looks on all of the ‘new’ AMD Radeon R7 and R9 300 series cards that were just launched this month.
- AMD Radeon R9 Fury X2 (What we are calling the Dual-GPU Fiji card)
- AMD Radeon R9 Fury X $649
- AMD Radeon R9 Fury $549
- AMD Radeon R9 Nano
- AMD Radeon R9 390X $429
- AMD Radeon R9 390 $329
- AMD Radeon R9 380 $219
- AMD Radeon R7 370 $149
- AMD Radeon R7 360 $129
Legit Bottom Line: The PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 390X 8GB video card is a solid graphics card that uses the AMD Hawaii GPU, but will be a tough sell while the PowerColor PCS+ AXR9 290X 4GB video card is available for $140 less!