The AMD Radeon R9 390X is the most anticipated and most awaited graphics card that is expected to be revealed probably weeks from now. These past few months, AMD has been very silent about their next generation graphics cards. Some say most of the R9 300 series are just rebrands, other says that it will wipe out NVIDIA’s current line of GTX 900 graphics cards. Although not officially revealed yet, we have pictures of the upcoming AMD Radeon R9 390X (or at least that’s what the source says it is) thanks to WCCFTECH. And a better looking picture was leaked on ChipHell forums as well. Honestly I was expecting that the Radeon R9 390X would be huge, since previous rumors say that it will be water-cooled. I was thinking something like an R9 295X2 or shorter than that. But the Radeon R9 390X (if this is the R9 390X) is no longer than a reference GTX 970. Check out the photos below.
Image Credit: WCCFTech
Image Credit: ChipHell Forum
First Look at AMD Radeon R9 390X
According to reports, the AMD Radeon R9 390x will have a water cooled edition (or R9 390X WCE) and an air cooled variant. Looking at the pictures, it seems that the R9 390X is no longer than a reference GTX 970 or at least it’s PCB. If you have read some of the news related to the AMD Radeon R9 300 series, I’m sure you have already encountered that AMD will be using a new type of memory with HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) technology. These memory are 3D-stacked DRAM dies, making it possible to save space. Just like high rise buildings, they don’t occupy more ground space, but each level is stack from one another. Below is a slide from AMD which should be able to give you some idea.
The Radeon R9 390X Fiji GPU is said to be the world’s first graphics card to feature HBM.
AMD Radeon R9 390X Specs
The AMD Radeon R9 390X is reported to have a base clock speed of 1.05GHz with 4,096 stream processors GCN 1.2, 128 ROPs, 256 TMUs, 8GB HBM running on a 4096-bit wide interface that is said to have a clock speed of 1.25 GHz memory clock, and a bandwidth of 640 GB/s. The core is based on the new AMD Fiji chip, but not sure yet whether it’s 22nm or smaller.
Based on the picture above, the Radeon R9 390X doesn’t have any DVI ports any more. Instead it has an HDMI port and 3x DisplayPorts. It’s a sign that DVI ports are like becoming VGA ports, obsolete. Most probably we won’t be seeing DVI ports in next generation graphics cards any more.
AMD Radeon R9 390X Release Date and Price
The AMD Radeon R9 390X release date or at least date of announcement is expected to be sometime in early June. Most probably we will see it this coming Computex 2015, or at E3 in Los Angeles. As for price, the R9 290X was priced at $549, probably the so-called R9 390X will have a similar or higher price range. Hopefully more information will come out as June is just a few weeks from now.
Turns out that the image leaked by WCCFTech is the real deal, and the images from ChipHell is just a render (or created in Photoshop) of the R9 390X. But more or less will look similar.