Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB Review

Earlier this week I reviewed the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB (HERE) and while it wasn't as fast as the GTX980, it wasn't too far behind. At around £50 less (£347.99 inc vat) than many of the high grade, custom GTX980 solutions it would be justified to say it has a practical place in the market.

The Sapphire R9 390 Nitro 8GB is a more cost effective solution – this graphics card is released to go head to head against the Nvidia GTX970. As our tests have shown today, it is clearly able to outperform the Nvidia card – both are close to reference speeds according to manufacturer specifications. Not only that, but when manually overclocked to the limit, the R9 390 can trade blows with the more expensive R9 390X.

Nvidia's GTX970 has dominated the sub £300 market now for a long time and while many enthusiast gamers demanded their money back once the 0.5GB memory ‘issue' was highlighted and subsequently acknowledged by Nvidia's CEO – it has still sold by the bucketload. I still rate the GTX970 very highly.

The R9 390 has been released to target this card directly, and for the most part it could be considered a success. Our benchmarks today show it is more than capable of competing against the Nvidia GTX970 – even though it is basically a ‘tuned and tweaked 290' – which was released way back in 2013.

One of the big talking points with the 300 series is the doubling of memory to 8GB. Make no mistake, on the R9 390, it is going to make for a great talking point, if little else. The real limitation will be the power of the graphics core itself. It runs out of horsepower at Ultra HD 4K resolutions long before the 8GB of memory will ever be fully utilised.

Sapphire make great air coolers, and there is no doubt they need to, after all they have to keep these hot running Hawaii cores running cool. Their Vapor X, Toxic and Tri-X cards have been highlights for AMD over the last 24 months and I don't think they get enough credit. On a slightly negative note, I do wish Sapphire had fitted a backplate to their R9 390 Nitro, as it would have helped to dissipate the heat from several hotspots across the length of the PCB.

If you are in the market for an R9 390X – we recommend that you save around £80, pick up this R9 390 Nitro and then overclock it in Windows to 1,100mhz+. It is just as fast as the reference R9 390X and you can put the money saved into other hardware.

In comparison to GTX970 solutions, the Sapphire R9 390 Nitro is competitive. A page listing on Overclockers UK (HERE) shows GTX970 prices ranging between £260 and £320.

You can buy the Sapphire R9 390 Nitro from Overclockers UK for £269.99 inc vat.

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Pros:

• Fans turn off at light load.
• well built.
• great cooler.
• 8GB of GDDR5.
• Software overclocking reaps reward – as fast as more expensive R9 390X.
• outperforms the GTX970 at the same price.

Cons:

• weak ‘out of the box' overclock.
• demands a lot more power than the GTX970.
• no backplate – rear of PCB has hotspots.
• No HDMI 2.0 support.

Kitguru says: The Sapphire R9 390 Nitro is one of the best sub £300 graphics cards that money can buy. We actually see no reason to spend the extra on the R9 390X – as manual overclocking will push this card to the same performance zone for gaming.

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