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If you are in the market for a powerful sub £300 graphics card AMD's R9 390 still bears serious consideration. Right now there are some partner cards available at very competitive price points – the PowerColor R9 390 PCS+ that we look at today for instance, is currently available at only £250 inc vat. This card is supplied in an overclocked state and it ships with a proprietary triple fan, custom cooling solution. Is it worth a shortlist for a pre-Christmas upgrade?
We do like to see more graphics companies adopting high grade coolers because it can not only help reduce operating thermals, but it will ensure that overclocking potential is maximised. With the R9 390, we feel this is rather important. AMD's R9 390 has been a great buy since launch as when pushed hard it can often keep up with the significantly more expensive R9 390X.
Bearing this in mind, today we test the PowerColor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ at reference clocks and when pushed manually to the limits, via software.
| GPU | R9 390X | R9 290X | R9 390 | R9 290 | R9 380 | R9 285 | Fury X | Fury |
| Launch | June 2015 | Oct 2013 | June 2015 | Nov 2013 | June 2015 | Sep 2014 | June 2015 | June 2015 |
| DX Support | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Process (nm) | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Processors | 2816 | 2816 | 2560 | 2560 | 1792 | 1792 | 4096 | 3584 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 176 | 160 | 160 | 112 | 112 | 256 | 224 |
| ROP’s | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| Boost CPU Clock | 1050 | 1000 | 1000 | 947 | 970 | 918 | 1050 | 1000 |
| Memory Clock | 6000 | 5000 | 6000 | 5000 | 5700 | 5500 | 500 | 500 |
| Memory Bus (bits) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Max Bandwidth (GB/s) | 384 | 320 | 384 | 320 | 182.4 | 176 | 512 | 512 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 8192 | 4096 | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 2048 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Transistors (mn) | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 5000 | 5000 | 8900 | 8900 |
| TDP (watts) | 275 | 290 | 275 | 275 | 190 | 190 | 275 | 275 |
For the last 10 days we have been retesting many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and have made the switch to the 64 bit Windows 10 operating system as well. We compare the PowerColor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ against a myriad of high end solutions, including the AMD Fury X, Nvidia Titan X, Nvidia Titan Z, AMD R9 295X2, Nvidia GTX980 Ti, GTX980, GTX970, AMD R9 390X and AMD R9 390.
