The PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 provides a great gaming performance at 1440p with 8GB of GDDR5 memory including a quiet custom cooler with three fans and a backplate. The R9 390 has a nicely designed by PowerColor team. But it has an oversize 2.5 slots cooler and a custom PCB. The AMD Radeon R9 390 graphics card is based on the Grenada GPU, previously known as Hawaii GPU (used in R9 290 lineup.)
It uses AMD’s Graphics Core Next 1.1 architecture and to differentiate it from the older GPU, Grenada comes with a slight overclock for the GPU. Compare to the 947 MHz on the R9 290, which the R9 390 has 1000 MHz in the GPU. The graphics card offers mute fan technology to allow noiseless environment and reducing the power consumption when the GPU temperature is low than 60°C. Let’s take a closer look on the PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 8GB GDDR5 graphics card.
Specifications
Overview
The cooler on the graphics card is extremely silent despite it has 3 big fans on it to cool down this beast and it has a pretty sweet color accent that will suit your PC build. Good thinking by PowerColor to actually include a backplate for the graphics card to make sure the graphics card doesn’t bend due to the weight of the cooler. Plus, it has some ventilation that will cool down your graphics card slightly from a regular graphics card that doesn’t have a backplate.
Fortunately, the PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 8GB GDDR5 will require 6 PIN + 8 PIN power to provide sufficient power to get the card running. You wouldn’t want your card to suddenly die on you because it lacks power, right? The PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 8GB GDDR5 features two DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort that is enough for users who want to setup multi-monitor platforms.
Test Rig Configuration
Games Benchmark on 1080p
Comparing the R9 390 with the R7 370 from ASUS, it doesn’t show a close gap except on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt at max settings without any anti-aliasing; the game squeezed every drop of juice from the card to achieve an average of 44 FPS. Besides that, the 8GB RAM on the graphics card performed best on Grand Theft Auto V to achieve at least 70 FPS which is half from what the GTX 950 can achieve.
Synthetic Benchmark
As you predicted, PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 8GB GDDR5 is way more powerful than the mid-range graphics card from ASUS R7-370-4GDDR5 STRIX Edition.
