Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB (Rev 2 w/ backplate)

Sapphire box artwork moved from well endowed 3D rendered women to robots last year, and their stance hasn't changed with their latest hardware. Its moody artwork, but we reckon not many people take that much notice anymore.

Some technical data is listed on the back of the box.

The bundle includes a quality HDMI cable, literature on the product -alongside software. We do recommend you ignore the drivers on the disc and snag the latest version direct from the AMD website – these discs can often be months out of date.

The Nitro range of cards follow a very specific style – they are predominately black with silver accenting. It is a good looking card with three fans taking up the full length of the PCB underneath. This time there is a ‘Sapphire' branded backplate fitted to the PCB which will hopefully reduce the hotspots we noticed last time we tested this solution.

The card is equipped with a dual link DVI-D connector, three DisplayPort 1.2a connectors and a single HDMI 1.4a connector. Sadly, no support for the new HDMI 2.0 standard – which means you can’t get 4K 60hz from this connector. This is something I do depend on myself as I use a 4K Sony TV for my gaming (which has only HDMI ports).

The card takes power from two eight pin PCIe connectors. It has bridge less Crossfire support, exactly like the 290 and 290x.

The big change over the first revision that we tested back in July, is the newly fitted backplate – shown above.

We can see the GDDR5 memory is directly cooled from the heatsink above. 10mm heatpipes expel heat from the copper heatpipe, across a large rack of aluminum fins which span the full width of the PCB. The diecast heatsink bolts into the PCB to help improve rigidity. Sapphire equip the card with their Diamond Black chokes to help improve stability and longevity.

An overview of the Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB Rev 2 w/ Backplate. It is built on the 28nm process, has 64 ROPs, 160 Texture units, and 2560 unifed shaders. The core is clocked at 1040mhz, 30mhz faster than ‘Revision 1' which we reviewed in July. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1,500mhz, or 6Gbps effective – an improvement over the R9 290, which on the reference design was set at 5Gbps effective.

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