PowerColor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ Review

The PowerColor Radeon R9 390 PCS+ arrives in a somewhat bland looking box with the ‘PCS+' naming convention taking up most of the real estate. The graphics card itself is certainly worthy of some exposure, but perhaps the end user retail store market is so small now that it doesn't matter.

The bundle includes some literature on the product and a power converter cable. All you need are the latest graphics card drivers from the AMD website.

The Card is well made, and heavy in the hand. The metal cooler and branded backplate are responsible for the extra weight. The card is roughly 29 cm in length, so while long should fit in the majority of ATX chassis.

It draws power from a single 6 pin and a single 8 pin connector. There is full support for Bridgeless Crossfire.

The I/O plate is home to a DVI-I and DVD-D port. R9 Series graphics cards can support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time.

As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection. A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays. AMD still use HDMI 1.4 standard ports so you are unable to drive Ultra HD 4k resolutions with a 60hz refresh rate.

The large cooler has a oversized mounting plate to actively cool the GDDR5 memory as well.

An overview of the hardware in GPUz. The Hawaii core is built on the 28nm process and is overclocked to 1,010mhz. There are 64 ROPS, and 160 Texture Units, alongside 2560 unified shaders. The 8GB of Hynix GDDR5 memory runs at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective) across a 512bit interface.

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