R9 290/290x vs 390/390x

[Bullett00th]

I've been eyeballing the R9 290 for a while and only got to know about 390 recently. From what I understand it's a slight upgrade of the 290 with twice as much memory, but people say it's really unnecessary.

That said the price difference is barely noticeable and I'm planning to be buying no earlier than summer anyways.

What are your suggestions?
Replies along the line of 'you n00b better get a GTX 970' are also accepted. It's just that I have a long history with AMD cards and I've grown to love them.

[_I_]

they are all about the same

390 has more vram, but its pointless for games, only a few can use more than 4g

if you need a stronger gpu, 980/ti will be a better choice and use less power
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

[Bullett00th]

I know, but 980 costs literally twice as much as 290/390 where I live. My only other option within the price range is 970.

As for vram - surely for now, but who knows what happens in 4 or 5 years? Or is that too much even for this period?

[Black Mambo № 5]

390 is a good card. Since budget is probably a constraint on your side, the 390/390x is the best choice considering the double VRAM it has, so you are -- sort of future proofed in certain games.

On the other hand, a GTX970 is a pretty good alternative as well, I have it since launch day and it's deffo one of the best price-performance cards there, along with the 390.
But yeah, 8GB VRAM vs 4GB VRAM, makes a difference on higher resolutions. But for 1080p the 970(if you get it for cheaper than the 390) is a killer! Plus the extra Nvdia Gimpworks™ stuff you get with it and normally more games are optimized for Nvidia cards, becasue of corporate level sabotage and what not conspiracy theories are out there. But whatever... I digress!

Off late AMD has improved fairly well, if they keep improving like this I might probably consider re-joining the Red Team!

[Bullett00th]

Thanks for the advice. I've had my doubts about the 'red team' but rejoined it with HD 5870 1GB and it serves me to this day. Usually it took 4, max 5 years for my card to get noticably outdated, but this baby I got in early 2009 for Bad Company 2 and I can still run most modern games on medium-high settings pretty well (around 40 fps but that's fine for me), some even on ultra if they are well optimized (Mad Max), and I didn't even OC it yet.

R9 390 is about $60 cheaper than GTX 980 here, but that is considering the fact is around $60 here, but that both slightly exceed my expected budget, so that matters.

I CAN get both significantly cheaper by ordering on Amazon, but I'm slightly worried about ordering hardware from abroad, especially fragile and expensive hardware. Or should i just go for it?

[Black Mambo № 5]

Bullett00th님이 먼저 게시:

I CAN get both significantly cheaper by ordering on Amazon, but I'm slightly worried about ordering hardware from abroad, especially fragile and expensive hardware. Or should i just go for it?

Parts hardly get damaged during shipping, especially never from reputed online portals like Amazon.
But a few points I'd like to make is -- if ordering from a foreign country will still grant you proper local warranty support then go for it. I was looking to get a 500GB SSD from Amazon during a sale, but I contacted Samsung Support here in India and asked will they honor the warranty if I purchase it from Amazon US? They said no. So there's that risk.
I'd make sure to confirm from your local service center if they provide warranty for imported parts, or not.
If they don't, then honestly it's not worth risking unless of course you are getting the part for like 50% off it's price.
Also check if Amazon honors DOA(dead on arrival) products for foreign orders, ideally they should, but I'd still confirm it to be sure. Better safe than sorry.

Other than that, I don't think there should be any issue if you order the parts from abroad.

I had a 6870 that died on Sep 2014, so I switched sides, cause at that time the Green Team was the only sensible option for me!
But as they say -- competition is the best for consumers!

[PontiacGTX]

if you can find a r9 290 for 100usd less, it is worht buying it. it is the same 390 but with lower clock speed and 4GB

[Bullett00th]

Black Mambo № 5님이 먼저 게시:

I had a 6870 that died on Sep 2014, so I switched sides, cause at that time the Green Team was the only sensible option for me! :D:
But as they say -- competition is the best for consumers! :B1:

What happened? I thought the HD 5xxx and 6xxx series were quite reliable.
Thanks for your tips on Amazon. The issue is that they don't honor the warranty so I wasn't sure about that risk, but on the other hand I've only had a VGA die on me once, and even that after 3 or 4 years of service.

PontiacGTX님이 먼저 게시:

if you can find a r9 290 for 100usd less, it is worth buying it. it is the same 390 but with lower clock speed and 4GB

that's the thing, I'm not sure if the extra 4GB is worth it.


Here's the price range where I live:
R9 290: $340 - 410
R9 290x: $375 - 500
R9 390: $420 - 580
R9 390x: $500 - 650
GTX 980: $560 - 880

yeah I know the price ranges can be quite silly but that's due to the USD exchange rate going places all the time, so it depends on when the vendor bought the hardware. Plus these are different models with different cooling etc.

[upcoast]

http://www.techspot.com/review/1089-fallout-4-benchmarks/page2.html

I think I'd aim for the 390 8GB if you can get one in the $420-450 range with the better cooler, stay away from those stock amd blower coolers. If the gtx980 is way out of budget the next choice would be the 290x 4GB after the 390 8GB. Because you seem to like to hold on to a card you might want to look into eventual dx12 support and from my understanding amd has a slight upper hand than NVidia at this point but what Pascal is going to be exactly and when exactly it'll be released is anyone's' guess other than 2016.

I'm tempted to say wait it out until the Pascal dust settles but since the 6870 and 5870 are much the same performance I can empathize with what gpu pain you must be going through running the 5870 1GB

I've had no troubles with amd quality wise I still have a working 6870 backup tower,6850 wifes tower, r7 265 day to day tower, sitting in a drawer ,4760, x800xl, 9600xt but I use an R9 280x on the main gaming tower.

[Bullett00th]

I wouldn't say I'm going through particularly too much pain, the first game where I started really feeling the age of my card was BF4 and even after that there were well running new releases.

But it obviously won't be too viable throughout this year and up so I'm trying to assemble a new machine now within the budget.

As for waiting - not sure right now if i should. I wanted to get a new rig 2 years ago but I didn't really need one and decided to wait for better/cheaper hardware in time. By that time I could buy one for $2000. Then devaluation hit and that same amount in my local money is now worth $600, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better soon.

[Black Mambo № 5]

Bullett00th님이 먼저 게시:

What happened? I thought the HD 5xxx and 6xxx series were quite reliable.
Thanks for your tips on Amazon. The issue is that they don't honor the warranty so I wasn't sure about that risk, but on the other hand I've only had a VGA die on me once, and even that after 3 or 4 years of service.

A friend of mine still has his 5770 TwinFrozr running totally fine, LOL. Probably my ♥♥♥♥♥♥ luck but it just died off randomly, fans won't boot up, no display, nothing. Tested out on other machines, other slots, with other PSU, but nothing.

Also, IMO if you are 100% sure that you won't be gaming on more than 1080p resolution for the next 2 years(minimum), then the GTX 970(depending on your local price) is the best purchase, or the R9 390, more or less the same.

But as far as buying products without warranty is concerned, it's a massive risk. And reliability, durability, quality aside -- there's always that chance of an electronic item dying like whenever. So if you are saving like 50-60$ by buying it from Amazon, I'd suggest against it, not worth it.

So let's say you bought a 970 or whatever for 60-70 heck even 80$ cheaper than normal price, then too if it dies off in like a year or something that'd be money wasted, and these while being price-performance cards, are still relatively expensive.

Just to give you an idea, the MSI GTX970 4G Gaming edition I have has 3 years warranty in India. And I believe that should be somewhat similar in other countries as well.
So giving up 3 years of ASSURED product support over 80$ of savings sounds like a bad deal every which way!

[PontiacGTX]

Bullett00th님이 먼저 게시:

Black Mambo № 5님이 먼저 게시:

PontiacGTX님이 먼저 게시:

if you can find a r9 290 for 100usd less, it is worth buying it. it is the same 390 but with lower clock speed and 4GB

that's the thing, I'm not sure if the extra 4GB is worth it.


Here's the price range where I live:
R9 290: $340 - 410
R9 290x: $375 - 500
R9 390: $420 - 580
R9 390x: $500 - 650
GTX 980: $560 - 880

yeah I know the price ranges can be quite silly but that's due to the USD exchange rate going places all the time, so it depends on when the vendor bought the hardware. Plus these are different models with different cooling etc.

get the r9 290, , the only way you would need more than 4GB is on some games at 4k with ultra plus MSAA/SMAA/TXAA or higher resolution

but amd will be releasing new cards on h2 2016 with 14nm and maybe HBM for midrange

[Tender Loins]

290 vapor x is just as good as a 390. People only think the 390 is better because all comparisons are done with reference cards, in which 290 has extreme cooling issues and 390 doesnt

[Bullett00th]

Patrick World-Star님이 먼저 게시:

290 vapor x is just as good as a 390. People only think the 390 is better because all comparisons are done with reference cards, in which 290 has extreme cooling issues and 390 doesnt

sapphire's cooling systems are something else. My current 5870 uses vapor-x and it's simply cold and quiet, all the time.

From what I've seen 390 also utilizes Saapphire's cooling stuff but with other variations: NITRO and Tri-x

[Bullett00th]

Sorry for upping the topic but I'm still struggling to understand how important those 8 gigs of VRAm may or may not be in the future...

[_I_]

for gaming, by the time gpus need more than 4g, they will need a stronger gpu

4k may use 8g of vram, but it takes 2x r9 390 to hold a decent fps at settigns that will use more than 4g of vram