Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB Review

Allan 'Zardon' Campbell July 1, 2015 Featured Tech News, Graphics

The Sapphire R9 290 Nitro ships in a dark box, with another robot on the front.

There are some technical details on the back of the box, if you happen to be buying inside a physical retail store.

Our box included a quality HDMI cable, a software disc and some literature on the product.

Understated – we like it. Sapphire have opted for a clean, black and gunmetal visage – with three ‘Nitro' stickers on the fans. Black tends to suit any matched, coloured system build, so its a good choice.

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.

Due to all the screws, it takes quite some time to remove the cooler. 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. It is built on the 28nm process, has 64 ROPs, 160 Texture units, and 2560 unifed shaders. The core is clocked at a rather modest 1,010mhz, only 10mhz over the reference design – I was expecting 1,050mhz. 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.