Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB Review

1. Introduction2. Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X3. Overclocking the R9 390X4. High Res Gallery5. Testing Methodology6. 3DMark Vantage7. 3DMark 118. 3DMark9. Unigine Heaven Benchmark10. Grid AutoSport (1440p)11. Grid AutoSport (Ultra HD 4K)12. Tomb Raider (1440p)13. Tomb Raider (Ultra HD 4K)14. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (1440p)15. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Ultra HD 4K)16. Grand Theft Auto 5 (1440p)17. Grand Theft Auto 5 (Ultra HD 4k)18. Metro Last Light Redux (1440p)19. Metro Last Light Redux (Ultra HD 4K)20. Thermal Dynamics/IR Thermometer Readings21. Acoustics Performance22. Power Consumption23. Closing Thoughts24. View All Pages

Today we take a look at one of the latest graphics cards from Sapphire – the new R9 390X featuring the latest version of their Tri-X cooling system. This top level graphics card ships in an overclocked state and features a custom triple cooler – shipping with 3x 90mm dual ball bearing fans. This card is designed to target the 4K market – priced at £349.99 inc vat in the UK.

It is not always possible for AMD or NVIDIA to release completely ‘fresh' new hardware running on brand new architecture. My colleague Anton has detailed the new range of cards, alongside the previous 200 generation and you can recap on this, over HERE.

GPU	R9 390X	R9 290X	R9 390	R9 290	R9 380	R9 285
Launch	June 2015	Oct 2013	June 2015	Nov 2013	June 2015	Sep 2014
DX Support	12	12	12	12	12	12
Process (nm)	28	28	28	28	28	28
Processors	2816	2816	2560	2560	1792	1792
Texture Units	176	176	160	160	112	112
ROP's	64	64	64	64	32	32
Boost CPU Clock	1050	1000	1000	947	970	918
Peak GFLOPS (SP)	5914	5632	5120	4849	3476	3290
Memory Clock	6000	5000	6000	5000	5700	5500
Memory Bus (bits)	512	512	512	512	256	256
Max Bandwidth (GB/s)	384	320	384	320	182.4	176
Memory Size (MB)	8192	4096	8192	4096	4096	2048
Transistors (mn)	6200	6200	6200	6200	5000	5000
TDP (watts)	275	290	275	275	190	190

The 300 series launch around 18 months after the 200 series has meant that AMD have been able to enhance the ASIC design by implementing microcode enhancements and the manufacturing processes have improved. We can consider the 390X an ‘improved 290X' – with the added bonus of double the memory – an increase from 4GB to 8GB.

Well, this is not completely true, as Sapphire have been releasing 8GB 290X's for some time now. We were even able to test Sapphire's 8GB VaporX cards in Crossfire, way back in November 2014.

So what do I have in store for you today? For the last week I have been running a series of tests at both 1440p and Ultra HD 4K resolutions – with the latest AMD and NVIDIA drivers – to keep everything on a completely even footing. It is time consuming, but worth it, especially with the release of the new ‘tweaked' hardware. All AMD video cards are tested with the 15.6 Catalyst Beta, and all Nvidia cards the Forceware 353.30 driver.

The R9 390X has been released to specifically target Nvidia's GTX980 so it will be interesting to see how that battle shapes up – as well as being able to take a look at the new card within a broader selection of hardware. Our Fury X review is coming soon, we have had it for some time now.


Sapphire have been using robotic box artwork now for some time. Don't mess with this guy, he will rip your arms off.

Accessories include an HDMI cable, a software disc and some literature on the product.


The Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X is built on a black PCB and the cooler is also black, with some yellow accenting on the sides. The cooler overhangs the end of the PCB a little. I was a little saddened to notice that Sapphire haven't decided to fit this particular card with a backplate – as is becoming more commonplace now on high end solutions. While we like a backplate to help deal with hot spots on the rear of the PCB, Sapphire say that this card has a fully sized heatsink which is screwed into the PCB in many places – to make it more rigid.

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. Thick heatpipes expel heat from the copper heatpipe, across a large rack of aluminum fins which span the full width of the PCB.

An overview of the Sapphire R9 390X. It is built on the 28nm process, has 64 ROPs, 176 Texture units, and 2816 unifed shaders. The core is clocked at a rather modest 1,055mhz, only 5mhz over the reference design – I was expecting 1,100mhz. The 8GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 1,500mhz, or 6Gbps effective – an improvement over the R9 290X, which on the reference design was set at 5Gbps effective.
As we spent another week testing all the hardware in this review with the same, latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA we thought it might be beneficial to also include results of the Sapphire R9 390 X Tri-X 8GB in its maximum overclocked state – alongside ‘out of the box' performance.

How far can the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X be pushed? We used MSI Afterburner to get our results today.


We managed to increase the core clock to 1,144mhz before instability would occur – this translates to around a 8.4% increase in core speed. The GDDR5 memory exhibited headroom of an extra 9%.

All our graphs today will show performance from the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB at ‘out of the box' speeds, along with a yellow arrow pointing upwards to indicate results at 1144mhz/1631mhz. This will show what you can expect out of the R9 390X architecture before it reaches a limit. Obviously not all cards will overclock to the same level, but this is a good indicator.On this page we present some high resolution images of the product taken with a Canon 1DX and Canon 28-70mm F2.8 lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source.






For the last week we have been testing and retesting all the video cards in this review with the latest 15.6 Catalyst and 353.30 Forceware drivers. We have also selected some new game sections to benchmark during our ‘real world runs'.

If you want to read more about our test system, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page. We are using an Asus PB287Q 4k and Apple 30 inch Cinema HD monitor for this review today.

Due to reader feedback we have changed the 1600p tests to 1440p, and we have also disabled Nvidia specific features such as Hairworks in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt as it can have such a negative impact on partnering hardware. Anti Aliasing is also now disabled in our tests at Ultra HD 4K as readers have indicated they don't need it at such a high resolution. If you have other suggestions please email me directly at zardon(at)kitguru.net.

As a further note, our GTX970 sample died last week, and while another is now with us, due to tight time constraints it did not make this particular review. We are reviewing the new Sapphire R9 290 Nitro later this week and those results will make it into that review.

Cards on test:
Sapphire R9 295X2 (1,018 mhz core / 1,250 mhz memory)

Nvidia Titan Z (706mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)

Gigabyte GTX980 Ti G1 Gaming (1,152mhz / 1,753 mhz memory)

Nvidia Titan X (1,002 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)

Nvidia GTX 980 Ti (1,000 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)

Asus GTX980 Strix (1,178 mhz core / 1,753 mhz memory)

Sapphire R9 390 X 8GB (1,055 mhz core / 1,500 mhz memory) & (1,144mhz core / 1631 mhz memory)

Sapphire R9 290 X 8GB (1,020 mhz core / 1,375 mhz memory)

Asus R9 290 Direct CU II ( 1,000 mhz core / 1,250 mhz memory)

Asus R9 285 Strix (954 mhz core / 1,375 mhz memory)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Grid AutoSport
Tomb Raider
Grand Theft Auto 5
Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt
Metro Last Light Redux

We perform under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Game descriptions edited with courtesy from Wikipedia.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.


At the ‘out of the box' clock speeds, the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB fails to match the Asus GTX980 Strix. When we overclock the Sapphire card however to the limit, it does manage to push ahead of the Asus card. That said, we know the Asus GTX980 Strix has quite a lot of potential for overclocking too. The older Sapphire R9 290X Tri-X 8GB is outperformed easily by the new Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB.
3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.


AMD hardware scores well in the older Direct X 11 benchmark suite from Futuremark. We can see the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB manages to outperform the Asus GTX980 Strix by around 100 points – nothing much in it at all. Obviously overclocking the hardware reaps reward, increasing the graphics score to 19,981 points.
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.

Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.

To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”




We tested at both the default setting and the ULTRA setting , to get 4K scores. We can see the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB scores quite well, although it is outperformed by the Asus GTX980 Strix card at both resolutions. While overclocking the Sapphire card pushed the end result above the GTX980 at the lower resolution, the GTX980 remained ahead at 4K.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk. Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We test at 2560×1440 with quality setting at ULTRA, Tessellation at NORMAL, and Anti-Aliasing at x2.


Performance from the R9 390X 8GB is noticeably higher than the R9 290X 8GB, although the card is still around 3 frames per second behind the GTX980.
Grid Autosport (styled as GRID Autosport) is a racing video game by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008′s Race Driver: Grid and 2013′s Grid 2. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 24, 2014. (Wikipedia).

We test with the image quality on ULTRA and 8 anti aliasing enabled.

The Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB is well ahead of the older R9 290X Tri-X 8GB, although noticeable short of the GTX980, which is around 15 frames per second faster at these settings.
Grid Autosport (styled as GRID Autosport) is a racing video game by Codemasters and is the sequel to 2008′s Race Driver: Grid and 2013′s Grid 2. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on June 24, 2014. (Wikipedia).

We test with the image quality on ULTRA and 8 anti aliasing enabled.

At Ultra HD 4K, the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB can be manually overclocked to outperform the Asus GTX980 Strix, by 2 frames per second.
Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).

We test at 1440p with the ‘ULTIMATE’ image quality profile selected.

Out of the box, the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB is outperformed by the GTX980, although after pushing it to the limits, it manages to match the Nvidia solution. These are great results however and significantly ahead of the R9 290X Tri-X 8GB.Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far. (Wikipedia).

We test at 3840×2160 (4K) with the ‘ULTIMATE’ image profile selected. We normally reduce the image quality profile to ‘ULTRA’ at this resolution, but we decided to keep it at the highest image quality possible.

Out of the box, the game is borderline playable at Ultra HD 4K, although many gamers would not be happy with frame rates under 30. A few settings would need to be dialed down to improve the minimum frame rate. The GTX980 does not deliver playable frame rates at these settings or resolution either.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Polish: Wiedźmin 3: Dziki Gon) is an action role-playing video game set in an open world environment, developed by Polish video game developer CD Projekt RED. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt concludes the story of the witcher Geralt of Rivia, the series’ protagonist, whose story to date has been covered in the previous versions. Continuing from The Witcher 2, the ones who sought to use Geralt are now gone. Geralt seeks to move on with his own life, embarking on a new and personal mission whilst the world order itself is coming to a change.

Geralt’s new mission comes in dark times as the mysterious and otherworldly army known as the Wild Hunt invades the Northern Kingdoms, leaving only blood soaked earth and fiery ruin in its wake; and it seems the Witcher is the key to stopping their cataclysmic rampage. (Wikipedia).

We test with the highest image quality settings, although I have disabled the Nvidia Hairworks option specifically as it does kill frame rate on many cards. Graphics Preset is on ULTRA and Postprocessing is on HIGH.

I have played The Witcher 3 for around 85 hours and I have completed the single player campaign. I tested the game today by playing 4 different save game stages for 5 minutes each, then averaging the frame rate results for a real world indication of performance – one of the map sections we tested is one of the most demanding in the game and our results can be considered strictly ‘worst case'. The Witcher 3 is a dynamic world, so it is important to run tests multiple times to remove any discrepancies. Our results below are

This is one of the greatest PC games ever released in my opinion, so I spent around a total of 48 hours benchmarking it for this review alone – it should be on your must have list, if you don't have it already.

At these very high settings, the game is perfectly playable – and we can see the benefit of opting for the more expensive GTX980 Ti. That said, the Sapphire R9 390X delivers a good overall experience at 1440p, and overclocking it manually helps drive the minimum frame rates over 30.

The Sapphire R9 295X2 is a disaster in this game, with flickering textures and artifacting in some parts of the map. The Titan Z and GTX980 Ti G1 Gaming deliver the best results.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Polish: Wiedźmin 3: Dziki Gon) is an action role-playing video game set in an open world environment, developed by Polish video game developer CD Projekt RED. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt concludes the story of the witcher Geralt of Rivia, the series’ protagonist, whose story to date has been covered in the previous versions. Continuing from The Witcher 2, the ones who sought to use Geralt are now gone. Geralt seeks to move on with his own life, embarking on a new and personal mission whilst the world order itself is coming to a change.

Geralt’s new mission comes in dark times as the mysterious and otherworldly army known as the Wild Hunt invades the Northern Kingdoms, leaving only blood soaked earth and fiery ruin in its wake; and it seems the Witcher is the key to stopping their cataclysmic rampage. (Wikipedia).

We test with the highest image quality settings, although I have disabled the Nvidia Hairworks option specifically as it does kill frame rate on many cards. Graphics Preset is on ULTRA and Postprocessing is on HIGH.

I have played The Witcher 3 for around 85 hours and I have completed the single player campaign. I tested the game today by playing 4 different save game stages for 5 minutes each, then averaging the frame rate results for a real world indication of performance – one of the map sections we tested is one of the most demanding in the game and our results can be considered strictly ‘worst case'. The Witcher 3 is a dynamic world, so it is important to run tests multiple times to remove any discrepancies. Our results below are

This is one of the greatest PC games ever released in my opinion, so I spent around a total of 48 hours benchmarking it for this review alone – it should be on your must have list, if you don't have it already.

At Ultra HD 4K, and at these settings, the engine is barely playable on most of the hardware we tested, although the Gigabyte GTX980 Ti G1 Gaming delivers a remarkable experience.

Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.

The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).

We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’. We found some intensive sections of the Grand Theft Auto 5 world and tested each card multiple times to confirm accuracy. The game demanded around 3.5GB of GPU memory at 1440p and just over 4GB at 4K.

Perfectly playable at 1440p, holding over 30 frames at all times.
Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series.

The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia).

We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’. We found some intensive sections of the Grand Theft Auto 5 world and tested each card multiple times to confirm accuracy. The game demanded around 3.5GB of GPU memory at 1440p and just over 4GB at 4K.

This game proved too much for the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB at Ultra HD 4k – at these settings anyway. The Sapphire R9 295X2 delivered the best results, holding above 40 frames per second at all times. The Titan Z suffered at this resolution, while it led the pack at 1440p.
On May 22, 2014, a Redux version of Metro Last Light was announced. It was released on August 26, 2014 in North America and August 29, 2014 in Europe for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Redux adds all the DLC and graphical improvements. A compilation package, titled Metro Redux, was released at the same time which includes Last Light and 2033. (Wikipedia). We test with following settings: Quality-Very High, SSAA-off, Texture Filtering-16x, Motion Blur-Normal, Tessellation-Normal, Advanced Physx-off.

A great gaming experience at 1440p, averaging 60 frames per second at the out of the box settings. The GTX980 is a little faster, until the R9 390X is overclocked to the limit.
On May 22, 2014, a Redux version of Metro Last Light was announced. It was released on August 26, 2014 in North America and August 29, 2014 in Europe for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Redux adds all the DLC and graphical improvements. A compilation package, titled Metro Redux, was released at the same time which includes Last Light and 2033. (Wikipedia). We test with following settings: Quality- High, SSAA-off, Texture Filtering-16x, Motion Blur-Normal, Tessellation-Normal, Advanced Physx-off.

A demanding engine at this resolution and certainly best playable at these settings on the Titan Z or R9 295X2.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 23c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The cooler copes reasonably well, although it does have to deal with quite a lot of heat from the PCB.

We install the graphics card into our system and measure temperatures on the back of the PCB with our Fluke Visual IR Thermometer/Infrared Thermal Camera. This is a real world running environment.

Details shown below.

The rear of the card heats up in one area quite a bit, hitting almost 87c under full load. This is hot, although not critical. There is no doubt that a backplate would help spread this heat out better over the length of the card.

We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation. Ambient noise in the room measures close to the limits of our sound meter at 28dBa. Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The card isn't the quietest we have tested although it is not that intrusive when gaming. Most case fans are likely to drown it out. The fans do switch off at lighter load which is useful if you are only browsing the net, or working in Office.To test power consumption today we measure power consumption from the whole system when idle and when gaming, excluding the monitor.

Under gaming load, the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X system consumes just over 350 watts. By comparison, the Asus GTX980 Strix system consumes only 282 watts – around 70 watts less.There is no doubting that the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB is a great graphics card, but it faces some serious competition in 2015. Sapphire were the first AMD partner to release 8GB versions of their R9 290/X cards way back in 2014. We reviewed many of them on KitGuru at the time.

While it is reassuring to have such a large amount of GDDR5 memory on board, the real limitation is actually the power of the graphics core itself. It runs out of horsepower at Ultra HD 4K resolutions long before the 8GB of memory would be fully called to task.

We all know big numbers sell however, so perhaps there is a possibility that some punters will opt for the card, just because of the additional memory in the store listings.

AMD have been pushing the 390X to take on the GTX980, and it does struggle to compete. While this is going to be very game specific, we have no doubt that the GTX980 is the faster solution. In our efforts to make things more interesting, we did put in extra time by overclocking the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB to the limits, at 1,144mhz and then including all the results here today, for every test. At these enhanced speeds, the 390X was a match for the Asus GTX980 Strix – although this is not strictly an apples to apples comparison – after all the GTX980 responds well to manual overclocking too.

While the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB isn't quite at the same level as the GTX980 it also isn't as expensive. You can buy this card from Overclockers UK for £347.99 inc vat. If you run your eye down the list of GTX980's available at the same store HERE, you can see they are often much more expensive. The Inno3D GTX980 Herculez X3 Ultra is one of the least expensive options, but it is still £35 more.

There is no doubt Sapphire can build great air coolers, we have been singing their praises for years now, their Vapor X, Toxic and Tri-X cards have been the shining light for AMD in the last 24 months.  Sapphire do point out that this card has a fully sized heatsink which is screwed into the PCB in many places – to make it more rigid – but we are a little disappointed they didn't fit a quality backplate, because the rear of the PCB does get hot under load.

Buy the Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB from Overclockers UK for £347.99 inc vat.

Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.

Pros:

• Fans turn off at light load.
• well built.
• great cooler.
• 8GB of ram is great in theory.
• Runs cool.
• Decent overclocking capabilities.

Cons:

• Weak ‘out of the box' overclock
• 290X deals are out there.
• no backplate so PCB gets hot at rear.

Kitguru says: The Sapphire R9 390X Tri-X 8GB is a great solution, but it does face stiff competition from Nvidia. Right now while it can't quite match the modified GTX980 cards, it is less expensive.

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