Well, modded drivers would bring card utilization near 100% in modern titles, as you saw yourself. If you really got this for 150 USD (not GBP) then it is a pretty decent bargain, despite huge power consumption.
Really a shame AMD ended driver support after only 6 years, as the card was like an 8GB version of the GTX 970 with an architecture that works better with DX12 and Vulkan.
@@screwb1882 then why does nvidia still support their 900 series gpus that are 7 years old as of today. Nvidia didnt even stop supporting the kepler arch until it was 8.5 years old.
@@Time_Traveling_Lesbian Because the 9 series is close enough to the 10 series architecturally that adding support is trivial. The same reason the 7970 kept driver support for so long. The 390 is a rebranded 290 which launched alongside Kepler. Also if you think new Nvidia drivers on end of life cards are even worth installing you need a reality check. Kepler drivers where a nightmare even when they had official "support".
Those R9 cards are still holding up pretty well in performance even the slower r9 380 is still performing well in most titles. A friend of me is still happy with his R9 380, because it is still running everything he plays very well.
I have 380. If you stick to 1080p@30fps for games post card release you will be fine up until AAA post 2019 or so, and even then it will be dependent on the game.
Still surprises me that AMD had these cards basically last through 3-4 generations & matched/beat the competition despite any financial or other setbacks of the time
AMD Really did make a bad call at a really bad time with dropping driver support for all GPU's before the RX 400 series. These cards, and even the 280x, 285 and 290x even for that matter still have a decent bit more life and performance left. It's really baffling.
They didn't make a bad call for their investors though, they want Fury & R9/R7 owners to finally give up on the "idea" of getting a good sub $200 upgrade. Sad what AMD has done for the past 2 years towards their users, not only killing gpu driver support for Fury, R9 & R7 owners but also refusing to allow ZEN3 to work on x370 boards (but yes on A320) and also the whole debacle of trying to avoid supporting B450/X570 with Ryzen 5000 too. I'm thankful for custom drivers (not because i need them, i have a 5700xt) since they allow those working old GPUs to still give good 1080p performance.
@@shanksisnoteventhatstrongbruh Not to mention how they've handled legacy OpenGL support. I still ended up buying a RX 6600 recently to upgrade my 1050 Ti. If I wasn't using Linux, I would have bought another Nvidia card.
AMD drivers on the rx400 and 500 series ain't much to shout about. They keep messing the driver's up so you end up hunting for older drivers which still perform.
@@shanksisnoteventhatstrongbruh the custom driver allows you to install the new driver on unsupported older card but there still no optimization on older cards. And if there is specific issues on older architecture there won't be a fix in the new driver either
@@Defy_Convention Why from a business perspective should AMD use it's limited software development team to support depreciated hardware? The only reason to bitch about this is the lack of affordable replacements right now but for a long time you could have gotten a 8gb rx 580 for $100 or a Vega 56 for $200. It isn't practical to support old architectures indefinitely.
Got an R9 380 4GB Sapphire, and its brilliant for what i use it for. Got it for 96 quid (and during the peak of GPU shortages). They've only just stopped updating the drivers for them in April. Mine runs on load at 68 to 76 degrees which isn't that bad (considering I killed a R9 270X by getting it up to 105). Also running it with a FX6300, so it is a hotbox. I can't fault it, yet. Only problem I've had with it is to do with the fans, they dont kick on properly with the normal AMD software, but with MSI Afterburner and the custom fan control it works flawlessly. (I get about 40fps on Beam but then again that comes down to the FX6300)
I ran with an FX-6300 + that same model of 380 for years and doing benchmarks before an upgrade, the 6300 holds that card back so much. It's insane. I'd legit never recommend FX to anyone for any reason.
Done any overclocking on that FX 6300 ? worth getting a cpu cooler & pushing it too 4.5 ghz & adding -threads 6 too source games helps performance a bit, dunno how many other games you can do this with but worth looking up for some extra performance if you cant afford a swap too am4 B450 motherboard a 6 core cpu & 16 gb ddr4.
I still have a R9 390, it does the trick and matched the most popular mid range cards (480/1060). It's a warm running card though, that's probably the biggest downside. But undervolted it runs at an acceptable temperature and I'm hoping it doesn't break in the next couple years. Mad that I can get nearly the same price as what I bought it for. It's like 6 years old ffs.
@@xPandamon I had a Sapphire HD 6870 die on me as well. Although it likely lived quite a hard life, I bought it used for 50 USD back in 2014, I have no idea how many hands it has passed through before then. I lived in California at the time without AC. During the summer getting to triple digit Fahrenheit indoors wasn't uncommon. It died during the summer of 2018 during those conditions. I liked that card quite a bit, ended up replacing it with a used sapphire nitro+ RX 470, which has been great post-repaste. My living conditions are better now, so I hope it'll handle my abuse for more than four years this time.
Similar with the 480 and 580. I remember picking one up for £200 new just before the first crypto boom. I dont think I ever saw it return to that price point again. Last time i checked fhey were pushing £300 second hand. I pocked up a RTX2060 for £300 again before the madness started. What im realising is I shouldn't buy graphics cards. Bad things happen
I run that exact Sapphire Nitro 390 in my spares/budget machine paired with a 3400G, for 1080p it's absolutely perfect with most titles even now, driver support notwithstanding. I bought this card when it came out and was extremely chuffed with its performance, the 8GB of VRAM is a tad unnecessary though. Only use it for light gaming now, because it lives next to my main rig and can't handle what I need from the more powerful system but it's always been a favourite of mine even though it's far from my most powerful card. I can never bring myself to sell my hardware, I get a weird connection with it and have amassed quite the collection over the years. Still own a 386 and a Voodoo card, somewhere
Linus actually explained in a video that gpu's used in mining don't lose power Even if you don't trust him all of that "mining cards are bad" is said by the makers of said cards
They don't lose power but they have many hours of usage. If it works its fine. I've inherited some old mining parts and they're all still in use today.
@@ryanmalin You could always get video memory degradation, sometimes leading to artifacts, but if you don't mind slapping on a custom bios with a lower memory clock, or use msi afterburner at startup instead.
@@PatalJunior had two used "cheap" GPUs... They lived for 1 and two years before kablowey. Now the third.... Wherend mining card. How do I know... Low end shit 🤣
and thank god they don't, considering that's where mine came from. That 1070 was pretty much the latest I could have got into PC building before the GPU crash. Gonna have to whiteknuckle on upgrades for the next... oh, 5 fucking years or so before anything changes.
So one question in my mind is Linux support as I have had all the r9 290 and r9 390 and the r9 fury running Linux, I'm still rocking the r9 290 for our family TV computer, runs great with a chimeraOS (gameros previously) I've not had any issues with Linux driver support, so maybe a comparison?
Not a 390 but, I bought the 290X at release and nothing can describe how hot, loud, and buggy that card was. It took AMD a whole year just to fix the crappy driver side of things and eventually it just stopped working properly. When I went to RMA the card I dropped that SOB on the floor, and out of fear retested to see if I bricked it completely. The card worked almost perfectly fine from that point onward. Needless to say, the conversation with MSI's RMA department was something out of a comedy.
Amd stopping driver support for these cards in THIS market is easily one of the dumbest decisions they could've done with these cards especially since they can still game but halo infinite is a good example of very capable cards being left out in the rain especially these days where no one can buy a graphics card these days
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Nvidia skipped 800 names and went from 700 to 900. While crappy move, their 700 series was older, aged worse and doesn't support full dx12 (therefore, some games). Furthermore, gtx 745, 750 and 750ti are still supported due to being Maxwell parts, not Kepler. Again, I don't like the move, but they are older and weaker cards.
@@youzernejm Well the 290X was in the same generation as the 700 series and the 390X and 390 were based overclocked versions of that so... it would make sense to discontinue it. Not to mention it's quite an old card even if the timing could be better it's understandable they'd want to stop wasting resources on those older cards.
@@HimmelWeint technically they were, but that didn't stop amd to offer it as a gtx 970 competitor. I'm not complaining too much about support stopping for 280x and below - as they don't even work with all games anymore, but 390 and Fury series, now that is just greedy at a time like this. As far as I'm concerned, that was just amd reminding us that they are just a company looking only at their profit margins and caring about consumers just about as much as they absolutely have to. They are trying to milk their current gen as much as they can, they are delaying new product launches, but they are also discontinuing still valid products. Greedy.
I would really appreciate if you used more contrasting colors in the benchmarks, im colorblind and find very hard distinguishing those 2 colors you used, great vid tho!
Some of my favorite memories of the 390 come from friends who bought 970s lamenting their purchases. Wild days those were, back when a new card launching was exciting and bringing price to performance up.
As someone who used to work in a computer repair shop, there were two things I remembered about these cards: 1) It was the first point where i really saw AMD cards straight up rejected by customers due to power/heat/noise 2) These cards, and really that generation in general, seemed to die quite quickly. r9 200/300 cards were not the most common card in the shop for repair, but there were a large number that came in for repair, usually a busted VRM.
@@azz09444 I had 3 Gigashyte cards and the only one that lived to be resold was a reference card so they couldn't fuck it up. My 7970 was crashing while in warranty (was very easy to replicate by running any continuous loop benchmark). I sent it to them and they told me there was nothing wrong with the card after holding it for a month. 2 weeks later the VRM literally exploded. Told Gigashyte what happened and that i JUST sent the card in under warranty and they told me they couldn't do nothing because the card was out of warranty by 2 days. Fuck Gigashyte.
I'd definitely love to see a full video full of benchmarks of games old and new on 390/390X, Fury/FuryX or even 260X, 7970, etc with last stable drivers and the newest modded drivers. Also DXVK benchmarking!
I had an R9 390 until just 2 years ago when I upgraded to a 5700XT. It was a great gpu and I took it to build my GF a pc. It ran every game she needed it to, but it was running way too hot. We ended up replacing it recently just because of temps.
That makes absolutely no sense, was it running like 110c avg core temp or something? If so bump the fans a little or repaste it. They are designed to be ran at higher temps (like Intel has its limits above 100c, that's just what they are fine running at). Maybe you meant noise? My brand new out of the box my Titan Xp screamed to the point you need hearing protection and it STILL hits thermal limits and downclocks heavily. The only way to make it not thermal throttle (and this is on an open air testbench mind you), is to crank the fans to where they sound like a jet at an actually ear damaging level at 100% and its still just 3c below thermal limits. I could see people returning those for that insane noise. My Fury cards though (basically the exact same cooler as in this video), run really nice and decent temps even at low fan speeds (sometimes for benchmarking I have to check if the fans are even running, and its really dark in that case so I usually reach up and whack, yep, fan appears to be running). I also had multiple R9 Fury in the same system, so I'm not sure how the temps could be any worse than crossfire. Could always get a better cooler, but colder doesn't mean it will last longer (fastest I've had a GPU die was when it was my daily machine and I ran its GPU at -60c for most of its life, running furmark I could get it up to -35c at the hottest). That same GPU in that example last I tested was still doing fine overclocked at around 120c (unplugged its fan on its air cooler), and yes the -60c is not a joke, I had to have heaters on the back of the GPU otherwise it would form frost on the outside of the insulation because I was cooling it with a phase cooler (basically a refrigeration system designed for CPUs at high heat loads and could run 24/7 if you wanted). So that's why I say everything has a range, too cold is NOT good for its life (though I did get over a 50% GPU overclock...) and running too hot (the 120c was technically just out of spec, though it wasn't crashing), they are designed for a specific operating temp just like car or jet engines, try to stay at whatever that temp is (like jets use 2000 degree "cooling air" to keep them cold, temperature is relative)
@@jakegarrett8109 I never said it was overheating. I merely said it was running too hot. My girlfriend was uncomfortable with the sounds it was making and it stopped her from playing games. I had repasted it with kryonaught but that only did so much due to the low end cooler on the 390. It wasn't worth putting extra money into considering its age. We ended up getting a 1660 ti that was much quieter and cooler.
@@RipinHimself Ok so it was a sound issue, I understand that. I try to get decent coolers for my cards. Unfortunately Nvidia flagship cards come with horrendous coolers, compared to Sapphire cards (Radeon only). My Sapphire Fury cards are extremely quiet under gaming and benchmarking, but now I have them on generic $20 waterblocks since I pack 4x into a system and the triple slot coolers wouldn't fit in all 4 slots), but they also sell $50 GPU AIOs with mounting hardware and heatsinks for the memory and VRM if you ever find a good deal on a card with a broken cooler. I try to avoid blower cards since they are only good for flight sims as they sound like a real engine and hot air blasting you in the face. I once used one next to a sink as a hand dryer... and that card idled at over 70c with the fan screaming (about 250w at idle) and under load overclocked on Furmark got to an absurd temp I'm not really sure what it topped out at but it did great for drying hands!
Loved it , had 1 until recently although R6 Siege would complain about an outdated driver even before Amd ended support but other than that i was impressed with what it pulled off being so old
Thank you for making this! I have been using the R9 290 for probably too long and was considering upgrading to the R9 390 for the higher quantity of VRAM. So little material to help decide if it's worthwhile or if I should stick it out longer. Thank you for making such a high quality and informative video for cheapskates like me to make sure we get the most bang for our buck.
With the current price of graphics cards there is no way in hell I would buy one with only 5 years support, not when the hardware is more than capable of running modern titles.
have a 390x 8gb in one rig, and an rx470 4gb in the other - paid about £70 for each one about 3 and 6 months before things got crazy. Got the 390x as the 470 did'nt quite crack 60fps on Warzone at 1080p low (the 390x easily managed 60+ 1080 medium) - hopefully the lack of driver support wont nobble it too much going forward
Thats strange, i have an XFX RX 470 4gb and it pulls easily more than 60 fps on warzone, with a mix of medium/high. I know that the 390x should get more performance, but maybe the GPU is not the issue
I' ve got a similar experience, but on 1440p. A rx470 wasn't powerful enough for that resolution and strangely a r290x is. Also had rx580 and 5600xt and altough they are Both quicker the R9 290x is still a Nice card
7:00 Thats absurd! That framerate is garbage! I can't believe AMD abandoned the R9 cards given that they were out at the same time as Nvidia's 900 series.
Especially when there is a literal disaster with GPU prices.... People will want to buy something cheap that can play the newest titles on low settings and they wont get driver updates...
@@stefanmarinov2864 I think Nvidia users with GeForce 800 and older feel the same because those are also abandoned in terms of driver support. So basically even something like GTX 780, GTX 780-Ti, Titan, Titan Black, and Titan Z which are all decent cards will run new games very bad.
@@youtubeshadowbannedme yeah except that's SLIGHTLY more understandable vs what was the 900 series competitor. To be fair the GTX 760 and 750/Ti are still supported I think because they were maxwell vs Kepler. Which ofc those two cards are still plenty usable in the modern Era tbf
I was a proud owner of an R9 290 from 2015-2020 and I must say that throughout the 5 years I owned the card it never disappointed me once. Sure, it ran hot but that’s to be expected from a 275W TFP powerhouse. After I sold mine, I ended up picking up a second one to throw in my secondary gaming PC. Still would be perfect card for budget 1080p gaming (given you can power it) if they didn’t cut off driver support for no reason.
Still rocking my R9 390 XFX Black Edition paired with my little i5 6600, 4x 4GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM Kingston HyperX FURY, Gigabyte Z170X GAMING 3 Mobo, (used to have a be quiet! Dark Rock 3, moved to an NZXT x52, then to my current generic air cooler for £30, after having issues with the NZXT, replacing it twice and not being able to find some assembly pieces for my be quiet). even with the generic air cooler, temps are super cool idle at 20 degrees Celsius and that's with me being generous, can get to 16 degrees Celsius and not going above 48 degrees Celsius under load, and that's me being generous again, usually around 41 degrees. A decent PSU, EVGA G3 850W which is overkill for my entire system The PC has served me well and i only use for around a week or so per year since 2019. Mostly used it a lot back when I built it in 2016. Plays most games that I like at 60fps+ at 1080p. Don't see any need to upgrade at the moment.
Though I have to agree I wish AMD still held out support for these cards a bit longer more so just because of fond memories than needing them (I have a 5700xt) that Halo result has to fall solely on the game. That's piss poor performance out of a solid card. They have arbitrarily locked out a number of GPU's that can most definitely run the game and even the ones that have full support are clearly not optimized well enough.
Oh absolutely! Theres no way some good support wouldn’t push these further.. part of why i am always hesitant buying gaming pc’s. Console just kind of last for soooo long.. 🤷♂️
Xbox One lasted basically 6 years, this card is 5 years old before it lost support. The difference? Your Xbox One games will never look better and they are stuck on that console. PC games can be turned up to very high and played on any new hardware you end up buying. PC is still the better option once GPU prices go back down (Mining will crash next year and cheap cards will be everywhere).
I've had the Sapphire R9 390x and i was very happy with it. Until my power supply gave up and burned the card... It's now sitting on the shelf as deco object because i like the look of the sapphire nitro :'D
Same. My PSU couldnt handle my R9 390 as well. At least it is a descent PSU and only the PSU died.. It was a 600W PSU, strange that it died cus my CPU's TDP is 105W... I used the warranty and then sold it and bought Zalman 750W.
The achilles heel of AMD's 200 and 300 series - it *really* needs driver optimisation to do well, hence all of the improvements we were seeing when it was still getting updates. My brother is glad that he has my GTX 970 instead of my HD7970 GHz.
@@marcox4358 Similar situation for my laptop with a 1GB M.R. HD5650. It overclocked by 150MHz, and I could switch between original OEM and the last drivers for better performance in OpenGL or DirectX (Minecraft ran at highest settings+far 60fps on OG, barely 40 low+short on last). That was several years ago however. Last game I played on it was WOWS, and it handled that well at low-medium settings 1366x768 60fps.
@@dabombinablemi6188 mine died playing WoT, WoWs ran very well at 1920x1080(native resolution). Multicore support snd drivers sure helped a lot with fps
I have one. it was the GPU that was originally in my PC that I am typing on right now. I replaced it with a GTX 1080 in 2017 and haven't used it since, but it ran Doom at 4K at good framerates in vulkan with good settings (don't remember specifics, but I think medium something). GTA V at 4K worked too, but it was usually under 60 FPS.
I bought an XFX R9 390x 8GB used in 2017 when my R9 290x went wrong and it has served me very well to this day. I ran it at 1440p for years until 2019 when it was moved into a spare machine running 1080p and still runs really well.
I never had this card, but I do have (not in my main system) an R9 280X (rebadge of HD 7970GHz as mentioned in the video) It is awesome. Played so many games so well even into 2018, at 1080p. Love the card to this day and I am confident with driver support it would run Halo Infinite just fine and any games with similar requirements.
i have a 4gb r9 290x tri-x, but since i'm using windows 8 pro (modded by me) i don't have a whql driver since 2014 for it. surprisingly even modern games like need for speed HEAT run at ultra with 60 fps!
bought a r9 270x a few years back for 20 pounds, needless to say it was a great card for the time, though the 1650 super became my primary card a few months later
1650 super is such a gem of a budget card! that one is going to be the rolls royce of budget cards for many years to come and in the second hand market later on! powerful, efficient, great price/performance.
It's funny seeing yet another video saying that AMD's driver support is very poor indeed. When I was looking for a new card, my friend decided to upgrade too, was insisting that he wanted AMD because of Nvidia's BS moves (which they were, they do a lot of BS that's for sure) but also insisted that AMD has gotten much better with their drivers- as did many AMD fans. Yet, many vids showed that their drivers were holding back performance back then and now: Here we are, a card that's not so old and it's not supported anymore while a card I sold to my cousin; GTX970 IS still supported and he has been enjoying a lot of new games, and it still runs a treat. He streams games with the card's built in NVENC with no problem despite the card being that old. Granted that's if he listens to me and turns off Volumetric lighting >:V
AMD drivers were almost always a disaster on release. RX480 shipping with BIOS that ran out of spec, features being still in development on release, performance issues. I like to believe it's a case of Stockholm syndrome by their customers. But I'm thankful that we have people that are willing to pay AMD to do QA for them, because having a market dominated by one company is not good for everybody involved.
@@kaminekoch.7465 Absolutely, I'm in no way arguing for Nvidia only, competition is always good for us. Which is why I'm so damned frustrated that AMD just seems to roll with their GPUs being in the biggest consoles and make bank off that on the GPU side of things. Like, I got their CPU the 3900x and it's fantastic, no complaints. But every time I look at their GPUs, I am just ...no, thank you. Had 2 laptops many years ago with their GPU tech in, both were super annoying to game on simply because of the drivers and having to bounce between the official ones or 3rd party ...depending on the game. And I don't think one of my laptops EVER got GPU update, was always 1.0
I'm still using my R9 390 8Gb. XFX brand. My first one was that exact one in your video, Sapphire Nitro. It was a gigantic pile of junk. It lasted 2 weeks and then completely fried out. It was constantly doing black screens and giving be bsod before it died. The XFX brand one has been faithful and serving since I got it. The beefiest fastest card I've ever had. As far as games and performance, it still to this day plays just about every single game I have on steam and epic (this includes AAA games made THIS YEAR) on high and ultra 144hz with nothing below 55fps. The 512bit memory bus is a beast for the high memory intensive games that I don't see a lot of cards have currently. It is a very good card still, imo.
My buddy had a 390 a while back and all I heard from him at the time was that it ran hot and had iffy drivers. Side note, love Jedi Fallen Order in the benchmarks!
I've been using this card since 2017 and I've never had any issues with the kinda of games I play. Even apex legends maxes out at above 60FPS meaning yay. My friends 1060 is on medium low setting and apparently it's the 3GB of VRAM.
Considering I had a 970 back in the day, I thought by this point the 390 would be better seeing as it has much more VRAM, I didn't think AMD would stop supporting these cards so quickly.
@@arenzricodexd4409 the worst part is its kinda planned obsolesence, since you can get modded (forcing later drivers to load) drivers for terascale that have huge improvements in GTA V for example, amd coded the later drivers for a few terascale-containing APUs but refused to officialy release it for the rest of the lineup
@@virtualtools_3021 nah more like AMD did not want to support for a very long time even if some of their future product using those old architecture. But this is the standard hold by majority of hardware maker.
@@arenzricodexd4409 theres no support needed other than not blocking the installation, it could just have a warning that you may experience issues and no support will be granted
I had an ASUS variant Strix, and the initial experience of the card was fine. It was during the adrenaline drivers where AMD dropped the ball hard. Suddenly many games began to have artifacts that were not in the previous driver version, AMD Wattman was not fully implemented, and there was an earlier version (I think crimson) that didn't turn the fans on... cooking your gpu without a notice. To say that AMD didn't care was an understatement, they just wanted everyone to forget GCN and move to Vega. The final nail in the coffin for me was the Linux instability issues, it took many years to fix AMD's open source drivers only for them to drop support in 2021. It's a nice card overall, but if AMD cared more it would have been a simpler recommendation.
I have the exact same gpu, but whenever there's a graphic stress, my screen turns black and nothing i press does anything. Could the cause of this be the standard power connection to the card? (A single cable splits into two of the ports for gpu) Or should there be a dedicated cable coming out of the power supply to each port in the gpu? I have a 750W power supply, so the power is for sure available.
I have an r9 290 tri-x and it performs amazing. I mean battlefield 5 everything cranked to ultra. And it dips to 55fps at the lowest. Seige ultra is 120fps. There is that heating issues I will admit but it's fine in the winter. It is at 1080p Bc my monitor is 1080p. But it does insanely well with triple a games. Bare in mind. It is 8 years old
It should be mentioned that at CEX you get a replacement first, or you get a proportion of your money back if they can't replace. If after a year it goes, and they have no replacements, you get half your money back.
I had this exact card and it worked just fine for years... Until it died this march. Now i miss it every single day. Goong back to an HD 6950 or using Intel's HD 630 makes me wanna jump of the window any time i feel like playing any game
I had an MSI R9 390 that did well over the years, (I mainly played at 1080p). The drivers were always a sore spot for the card, undermining the performance of it. The other issue was the thermals. Even after a repaste, it would shoot to 94°C whenever load was put on it. It recently died of what I assume was heatdeath, and I upgraded to a 6700xt.
served u well, I have a friend who plays VR on his 390X, it's like a 980TI in some games. I'll fondly remember my RX 480, what a beast, in my country Nvidia was always king, had so many cheap second hand ATI/AMDs over the years. I did stick to the Nvidia ones after that legend, driver support is so good, and u can't find AMDs on the market anyway.
Can you benchmark this card on Linux with a recent version of Mesa? Since this card is fully supported by the Mesa drivers it would be interesting to see the performance differences.
I got the xfx version of this card from a friend of mine and have been useing it in my main pc since mid 2020. I did have to upgrade my case to one with front fans and mesh to make the card run cool. I don't play a whole lot of new and demanding games, but every game I have thrown at it runs at at least 50 fps some with med settings some with high settings. I'm quite salty about amd ending driver support for it around june of this year, but I will keep useing it until I can afford a card to replace it with which frankly won't be for a few years given the current market conditions and my personal situation. Oh well I've lived with worse pc hardware for the vast majority of my life I'll survive. I mostly play minecraft with the card and I am able to run shaders quite well with it, and its vce does wonders for my recording/streaming for my youtube channel. Tho I've replaced the fans on it once by now.
Absolutely loved this card. I had the PowerColor PCS+ version and I had to modify the BIOS just so the fans would never turn off. Yeah, could've been done in software but that means I'd have to set that up every time I install an OS. It was a fantastic performer though, and performed great on Windows, Linux and macOS. Ended up selling it a while ago and now I'm currently enjoying my 6700 XT.
Yooo, I had the same card and model, used it until a few months ago and loved it. Got it back when I was still living with my parents and boy did it heat up my room. Good times. Now using a RTX 3070
I mean there was another card between this and the Fury. The 390x had a few more shaders as well as slightly better clocks. Usually between 5-10% more performance on the x's over the non-x. Having said that GCN being a really good mining architecture and the two mining booms saw these cards never really drop as they should have. The 390x 100% is blow for blow with an rx 480. And the 480 uses less power. So as the 480's dipped in price the 390's should have dipped harder. But because the 480's were sought after mining cards in the first boom, and still well liked in the second boom it made them tougher to come by and drove the prices way up. And similarly the next best thing the 390's also elevated in price. Even when you had the dips (A year and a half ago you could grab 480's sub $100.00 and 470's for $75.00 dollars all day) the 390's really didn't drop below in an appropriate way. And prices have only recently started to fall with the end of life announcement. These cards yeah probably should be like 40 dollar cards right now. But likewise 750ti's probably should be 25 dollar cards right now. The market basically just had a reset where two generations of graphics cards as far as most people are concerned don't exist. And it shot the older cards prices right back where they were before those two generations happened. It's a strange time we live in.
Had an R9 290x Reference in my first real gaming pc, it was a beast could run most games at high or ultra at 60+fps 1080p, but man it sounded like a vacuumcleaner xD
Those cards still surprise me today. The R9 390x was one of the first 4K capable cards if I remember right. Lovely bit of graphics card history in these 2 cards alone!
I'm still using my MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G, paired with my Ryzen 5 2400G and 16gb of ram it does quite nicely still. I have it all in a Cooler Master HAF 912 tower, and with two 200mm fans in the front and top, along with 2 100mm fans on the side and rear, I haven't had my R9 past 65 degrees tops. I used to have a water cooled FX 8350 with my R9 390, but found a deal on the Ryzen setup, just still don't have the money for a new graphics card yet.
I had an R9 390 for 2 years. The XFX DD model I had was hot and loud, but it performed well at 1080p. It fell behind at 1440p after a while, and my model didn’t overclock much at all. But the card itself worked fine and I had very little issues with it. I upgraded to a reference Vega 64 when i managed to luck myself into getting one for 500 euros back when most were going for 800. The Vega 64 was even hotter and louder (but I expected that, it being the reference model), and I had tons of driver issues. Overwatch for example was unplayable for many months due to random crashing. I then swapped that piece of garbage for a 1080 Ti 6 months later with a miner who was looking for more Vega 64 GPUs. That 1080 Ti has been one of the best cards I’ve ever owned.
If it weren't for the need for a HDMI 2.1 graphics card, I would have kept my R9 390 8GB for much longer than I did. AMD's card still played games surprisingly well by the time I replaced it during the height of the pandemic.
I got rid of my R9 390 for $300 and I went and bought a EVGA GTX 980 4gb for $280 the card is awesome for VR but with the newer games I shouldn't have to install modified drivers and figure if a game will work for benchmarking
I had a GB WF3 R9 290, pretty happy with its BF4 Performance when Mantle/New APIs were coming in, played every game I needed to, but my core temps were always pretty high in Australia Summertime, I swapped it for a GTX970 3.5GB for lower temps (15-20*c cooler) and similar enough performance. I did love messing with AMD VSR features, overlay game tweaks to color and vibrances, beyond high temps I'd have kept it.
i am using an 8 year old R9 290 tri-x OC and its been holding up amazing, doesn't react too well to any overclocking, but it isn't needed as it does any game 1080p medium at 60fps+
i shocked that my RX 570 is way over 1000 USD now early this year is was bit cheaper Newest haio Plays in 1080p 30 to 40FPS R9 i wanted that card back in the day but i like Nnvida back then but this year going with AMD card i might never go back lol I still think them R9 Looks cool
Never used a laptop or PC after my Acer aspire 3000 in 2002, when limewire and bearshare was the hot thing .after that in 2007 I moved to the iphone and galaxy and never owned a laptop I even game on the galaxy s20, I play war robots I watch your channel because of your personality
I was hoping to get a R9 390 but i ddimt have the 140€ at the time (the same model in the video, clean and in box). As soon as i got paid the listing said sold. Was lucky enough and got a GTX 970 ITX for 65€. The seller wanted 100 but because i helped him alot he dropped the price. Funny enough the seller got the card for 20€ and its workimg and hasnt been wrecked. Even tho the fan on the heatsink was busted
There's a 290X paired with a 1600 in my brothers build and he still pretty content about it. If the game uses most recent API's, it's really good which can sometimes be about 980, otherwise it does struggle sometimes.
I have the r9 380x wich delivers the same performance in halo infinite all because of amd beeing lazy, it's kinda crazy, all because of "we want you to buy new products" policy
Very decent card overall, but my MSI blower variant shipped with a borked fan curve. The card would heat up to 80C where the fan would laaazily begin ramping up, almost never in time to stop the card from overheating and shutting down. This can easily be fixed in Afterburner, but what an insane flaw to ship the card with! I wonder if I should sell it while the prices are still ridiculous, as I imagine - another year, and this card will be worthless.
If amd is not going to provide cards @ msrp, at least they should give us updated drivers once a year for all those old cards that can still handle gaming loads.
Seems like a great card to use as a stopgap until the new cards are plenty available and aren't still getting scalped.snapped. Hopefully MS will do something about Halo Infinite since the card seems like it should have no trouble handling it.
r9 390 8gb 150$ LOL were? i sold mine for 270€ paid 70€ for it in 2020 from a friend who had 6 of them (he sold the others for 80€ to a cash shop) and one to a other friend for 50€ i also sold my friends one for 270€ and got him a rx6700xt for 500€
Alot of people talking about modded drivers in the comments. If you go to 9:00 in the video I actually have some Benchmarks with them. 👍
Excellent! I didn't have time to watch up to that point, but thank you for including those :)
Well, modded drivers would bring card utilization near 100% in modern titles, as you saw yourself. If you really got this for 150 USD (not GBP) then it is a pretty decent bargain, despite huge power consumption.
Did you remove the DLC HD textures?
So you did not use 1080p? There is this trend called dark node you should look into it for your charts.
R9 is those type of Graphics Card that sucks at Doom Eternal and Halo Infinite because they use they latest things in gpu unlike other games
Really a shame AMD ended driver support after only 6 years, as the card was like an 8GB version of the GTX 970 with an architecture that works better with DX12 and Vulkan.
Only 6 years? Industry standard is 5.
You should check out the nimez drivers for older AMD cards, pretty neat stuff
@@screwb1882 then why does nvidia still support their 900 series gpus that are 7 years old as of today. Nvidia didnt even stop supporting the kepler arch until it was 8.5 years old.
@@canaconn2388 Yeah and then i think he should test halo infinite perf again
@@Time_Traveling_Lesbian Because the 9 series is close enough to the 10 series architecturally that adding support is trivial. The same reason the 7970 kept driver support for so long. The 390 is a rebranded 290 which launched alongside Kepler. Also if you think new Nvidia drivers on end of life cards are even worth installing you need a reality check. Kepler drivers where a nightmare even when they had official "support".
"Halo did see performance increase by a little bit"
Literally move than doubled the frame rate 😂
140 percent increase!
British understatement
Those R9 cards are still holding up pretty well in performance even the slower r9 380 is still performing well in most titles. A friend of me is still happy with his R9 380, because it is still running everything he plays very well.
I have 380. If you stick to 1080p@30fps for games post card release you will be fine up until AAA post 2019 or so, and even then it will be dependent on the game.
Still surprises me that AMD had these cards basically last through 3-4 generations & matched/beat the competition despite any financial or other setbacks of the time
fine wine baybee!
Me who have r9 280 and still happy with it (:
A friend of mine has a r9 290x and he complains of the noise lol
AMD Really did make a bad call at a really bad time with dropping driver support for all GPU's before the RX 400 series. These cards, and even the 280x, 285 and 290x even for that matter still have a decent bit more life and performance left. It's really baffling.
I have a PowerColor PCS+ 290 and it still rocks, I run any game I want with installing it and doesnt do any graphics settings!
They didn't make a bad call for their investors though, they want Fury & R9/R7 owners to finally give up on the "idea" of getting a good sub $200 upgrade.
Sad what AMD has done for the past 2 years towards their users, not only killing gpu driver support for Fury, R9 & R7 owners but also refusing to allow ZEN3 to work on x370 boards (but yes on A320) and also the whole debacle of trying to avoid supporting B450/X570 with Ryzen 5000 too.
I'm thankful for custom drivers (not because i need them, i have a 5700xt) since they allow those working old GPUs to still give good 1080p performance.
@@shanksisnoteventhatstrongbruh Not to mention how they've handled legacy OpenGL support. I still ended up buying a RX 6600 recently to upgrade my 1050 Ti. If I wasn't using Linux, I would have bought another Nvidia card.
AMD drivers on the rx400 and 500 series ain't much to shout about. They keep messing the driver's up so you end up hunting for older drivers which still perform.
@@shanksisnoteventhatstrongbruh the custom driver allows you to install the new driver on unsupported older card but there still no optimization on older cards. And if there is specific issues on older architecture there won't be a fix in the new driver either
Curious GPU for the current market. Let's check it out! I seem to run my R9 280X just fine on alternate rigs.
AMD should have never ended the driver support for the older cards :(
There's still support for some (including this one) on the Linux drivers, since they're community developed
You going to pay for it?
They're getting greedy like Intel
never....as in never? so support forever?
@@Defy_Convention Why from a business perspective should AMD use it's limited software development team to support depreciated hardware? The only reason to bitch about this is the lack of affordable replacements right now but for a long time you could have gotten a 8gb rx 580 for $100 or a Vega 56 for $200. It isn't practical to support old architectures indefinitely.
Got an R9 380 4GB Sapphire, and its brilliant for what i use it for. Got it for 96 quid (and during the peak of GPU shortages). They've only just stopped updating the drivers for them in April. Mine runs on load at 68 to 76 degrees which isn't that bad (considering I killed a R9 270X by getting it up to 105). Also running it with a FX6300, so it is a hotbox. I can't fault it, yet. Only problem I've had with it is to do with the fans, they dont kick on properly with the normal AMD software, but with MSI Afterburner and the custom fan control it works flawlessly. (I get about 40fps on Beam but then again that comes down to the FX6300)
I ran with an FX-6300 + that same model of 380 for years and doing benchmarks before an upgrade, the 6300 holds that card back so much. It's insane. I'd legit never recommend FX to anyone for any reason.
Done any overclocking on that FX 6300 ? worth getting a cpu cooler & pushing it too 4.5 ghz & adding -threads 6 too source games helps performance a bit, dunno how many other games you can do this with but worth looking up for some extra performance if you cant afford a swap too am4 B450 motherboard a 6 core cpu & 16 gb ddr4.
@@BonJoviBeatlesLedZep FX were horrible, Ryzen was such an upgrade.
Something was terribly wrong with a 270x to reach 105 degrees
@@sc7293 Thwy were kinda a bargain compared to the intel cores.
I built two rigs with fx6300
Back when it was new.
I still have a R9 390, it does the trick and matched the most popular mid range cards (480/1060). It's a warm running card though, that's probably the biggest downside. But undervolted it runs at an acceptable temperature and I'm hoping it doesn't break in the next couple years. Mad that I can get nearly the same price as what I bought it for. It's like 6 years old ffs.
mine is dead. that was my last sapphire.
@@asdfjkl981 Unlucky. Sapphire make some of the best cards from my experience
@@xPandamon yeah it is the second consecutive sapphire that died on me. They were good performers. But not for very long.
@@xPandamon I had a Sapphire HD 6870 die on me as well. Although it likely lived quite a hard life, I bought it used for 50 USD back in 2014, I have no idea how many hands it has passed through before then. I lived in California at the time without AC. During the summer getting to triple digit Fahrenheit indoors wasn't uncommon. It died during the summer of 2018 during those conditions.
I liked that card quite a bit, ended up replacing it with a used sapphire nitro+ RX 470, which has been great post-repaste. My living conditions are better now, so I hope it'll handle my abuse for more than four years this time.
Similar with the 480 and 580. I remember picking one up for £200 new just before the first crypto boom. I dont think I ever saw it return to that price point again. Last time i checked fhey were pushing £300 second hand. I pocked up a RTX2060 for £300 again before the madness started.
What im realising is I shouldn't buy graphics cards. Bad things happen
I run that exact Sapphire Nitro 390 in my spares/budget machine paired with a 3400G, for 1080p it's absolutely perfect with most titles even now, driver support notwithstanding.
I bought this card when it came out and was extremely chuffed with its performance, the 8GB of VRAM is a tad unnecessary though. Only use it for light gaming now, because it lives next to my main rig and can't handle what I need from the more powerful system but it's always been a favourite of mine even though it's far from my most powerful card. I can never bring myself to sell my hardware, I get a weird connection with it and have amassed quite the collection over the years. Still own a 386 and a Voodoo card, somewhere
Linus actually explained in a video that gpu's used in mining don't lose power
Even if you don't trust him all of that "mining cards are bad" is said by the makers of said cards
They don't lose power but they have many hours of usage. If it works its fine. I've inherited some old mining parts and they're all still in use today.
@@ryanmalin You could always get video memory degradation, sometimes leading to artifacts, but if you don't mind slapping on a custom bios with a lower memory clock, or use msi afterburner at startup instead.
@@PatalJunior how low?
@@PatalJunior had two used "cheap" GPUs... They lived for 1 and two years before kablowey. Now the third.... Wherend mining card. How do I know... Low end shit 🤣
and thank god they don't, considering that's where mine came from. That 1070 was pretty much the latest I could have got into PC building before the GPU crash. Gonna have to whiteknuckle on upgrades for the next... oh, 5 fucking years or so before anything changes.
So one question in my mind is Linux support as I have had all the r9 290 and r9 390 and the r9 fury running Linux, I'm still rocking the r9 290 for our family TV computer, runs great with a chimeraOS (gameros previously) I've not had any issues with Linux driver support, so maybe a comparison?
Not a 390 but, I bought the 290X at release and nothing can describe how hot, loud, and buggy that card was. It took AMD a whole year just to fix the crappy driver side of things and eventually it just stopped working properly. When I went to RMA the card I dropped that SOB on the floor, and out of fear retested to see if I bricked it completely. The card worked almost perfectly fine from that point onward. Needless to say, the conversation with MSI's RMA department was something out of a comedy.
hahaha! :DDDD
Amd stopping driver support for these cards in THIS market is easily one of the dumbest decisions they could've done with these cards especially since they can still game but halo infinite is a good example of very capable cards being left out in the rain especially these days where no one can buy a graphics card these days
Nvidia also dropped support of older GPUs last year; so GeForce 800 series and older
@@youtubeshadowbannedme Nvidia skipped 800 names and went from 700 to 900. While crappy move, their 700 series was older, aged worse and doesn't support full dx12 (therefore, some games). Furthermore, gtx 745, 750 and 750ti are still supported due to being Maxwell parts, not Kepler. Again, I don't like the move, but they are older and weaker cards.
@@youzernejm Well the 290X was in the same generation as the 700 series and the 390X and 390 were based overclocked versions of that so... it would make sense to discontinue it. Not to mention it's quite an old card even if the timing could be better it's understandable they'd want to stop wasting resources on those older cards.
@@HimmelWeint technically they were, but that didn't stop amd to offer it as a gtx 970 competitor. I'm not complaining too much about support stopping for 280x and below - as they don't even work with all games anymore, but 390 and Fury series, now that is just greedy at a time like this. As far as I'm concerned, that was just amd reminding us that they are just a company looking only at their profit margins and caring about consumers just about as much as they absolutely have to. They are trying to milk their current gen as much as they can, they are delaying new product launches, but they are also discontinuing still valid products. Greedy.
@@youzernejm 800 series was in laptops.
I would really appreciate if you used more contrasting colors in the benchmarks, im colorblind and find very hard distinguishing those 2 colors you used, great vid tho!
Some of my favorite memories of the 390 come from friends who bought 970s lamenting their purchases. Wild days those were, back when a new card launching was exciting and bringing price to performance up.
Haha me too, my brother and his friend bought the 970 an I got the 390, I was like "have fun playing with your 3.5gbs of vram Turds!" Lol good days.
As someone who used to work in a computer repair shop, there were two things I remembered about these cards:
1) It was the first point where i really saw AMD cards straight up rejected by customers due to power/heat/noise
2) These cards, and really that generation in general, seemed to die quite quickly. r9 200/300 cards were not the most common card in the shop for repair, but there were a large number that came in for repair, usually a busted VRM.
I'm willing to bet most of those where Gigashyte. Their VRMs are notoriously horrible. Never buy a non reference Gigashyte card.
6 plus years later and mine still runs fine just needs a fan replacement
@@screwb1882 i literally had a gigabyte r9 280x rev2 and it served me for about 6 years with no problems until it died one day
@@azz09444 I had 3 Gigashyte cards and the only one that lived to be resold was a reference card so they couldn't fuck it up. My 7970 was crashing while in warranty (was very easy to replicate by running any continuous loop benchmark). I sent it to them and they told me there was nothing wrong with the card after holding it for a month. 2 weeks later the VRM literally exploded. Told Gigashyte what happened and that i JUST sent the card in under warranty and they told me they couldn't do nothing because the card was out of warranty by 2 days. Fuck Gigashyte.
Always buy Sapphire. EVGA quality for AMD pretty much.
I'd definitely love to see a full video full of benchmarks of games old and new on 390/390X, Fury/FuryX or even 260X, 7970, etc with last stable drivers and the newest modded drivers.
Also DXVK benchmarking!
I had an R9 390 until just 2 years ago when I upgraded to a 5700XT. It was a great gpu and I took it to build my GF a pc. It ran every game she needed it to, but it was running way too hot. We ended up replacing it recently just because of temps.
That makes absolutely no sense, was it running like 110c avg core temp or something? If so bump the fans a little or repaste it. They are designed to be ran at higher temps (like Intel has its limits above 100c, that's just what they are fine running at). Maybe you meant noise?
My brand new out of the box my Titan Xp screamed to the point you need hearing protection and it STILL hits thermal limits and downclocks heavily. The only way to make it not thermal throttle (and this is on an open air testbench mind you), is to crank the fans to where they sound like a jet at an actually ear damaging level at 100% and its still just 3c below thermal limits. I could see people returning those for that insane noise. My Fury cards though (basically the exact same cooler as in this video), run really nice and decent temps even at low fan speeds (sometimes for benchmarking I have to check if the fans are even running, and its really dark in that case so I usually reach up and whack, yep, fan appears to be running). I also had multiple R9 Fury in the same system, so I'm not sure how the temps could be any worse than crossfire.
Could always get a better cooler, but colder doesn't mean it will last longer (fastest I've had a GPU die was when it was my daily machine and I ran its GPU at -60c for most of its life, running furmark I could get it up to -35c at the hottest). That same GPU in that example last I tested was still doing fine overclocked at around 120c (unplugged its fan on its air cooler), and yes the -60c is not a joke, I had to have heaters on the back of the GPU otherwise it would form frost on the outside of the insulation because I was cooling it with a phase cooler (basically a refrigeration system designed for CPUs at high heat loads and could run 24/7 if you wanted). So that's why I say everything has a range, too cold is NOT good for its life (though I did get over a 50% GPU overclock...) and running too hot (the 120c was technically just out of spec, though it wasn't crashing), they are designed for a specific operating temp just like car or jet engines, try to stay at whatever that temp is (like jets use 2000 degree "cooling air" to keep them cold, temperature is relative)
@@jakegarrett8109 I never said it was overheating. I merely said it was running too hot. My girlfriend was uncomfortable with the sounds it was making and it stopped her from playing games. I had repasted it with kryonaught but that only did so much due to the low end cooler on the 390. It wasn't worth putting extra money into considering its age. We ended up getting a 1660 ti that was much quieter and cooler.
@@RipinHimself Ok so it was a sound issue, I understand that.
I try to get decent coolers for my cards. Unfortunately Nvidia flagship cards come with horrendous coolers, compared to Sapphire cards (Radeon only). My Sapphire Fury cards are extremely quiet under gaming and benchmarking, but now I have them on generic $20 waterblocks since I pack 4x into a system and the triple slot coolers wouldn't fit in all 4 slots), but they also sell $50 GPU AIOs with mounting hardware and heatsinks for the memory and VRM if you ever find a good deal on a card with a broken cooler.
I try to avoid blower cards since they are only good for flight sims as they sound like a real engine and hot air blasting you in the face. I once used one next to a sink as a hand dryer... and that card idled at over 70c with the fan screaming (about 250w at idle) and under load overclocked on Furmark got to an absurd temp I'm not really sure what it topped out at but it did great for drying hands!
lol 5700xt
@@RipinHimself yeah ur blow up gf
I had the (MSI) r9 390 about 2 years ago, interesting card it was in that time, a bit of a home heater tho :)
Loved it , had 1 until recently although R6 Siege would complain about an outdated driver even before Amd ended support but other than that i was impressed with what it pulled off being so old
Thank you for making this! I have been using the R9 290 for probably too long and was considering upgrading to the R9 390 for the higher quantity of VRAM. So little material to help decide if it's worthwhile or if I should stick it out longer. Thank you for making such a high quality and informative video for cheapskates like me to make sure we get the most bang for our buck.
I would seriously consider the rx 480 8gb instead. Driver support is very important for video cards.
jump to the 580 or the 1660 for the driver support.
With the current price of graphics cards there is no way in hell I would buy one with only 5 years support, not when the hardware is more than capable of running modern titles.
have a 390x 8gb in one rig, and an rx470 4gb in the other - paid about £70 for each one about 3 and 6 months before things got crazy. Got the 390x as the 470 did'nt quite crack 60fps on Warzone at 1080p low (the 390x easily managed 60+ 1080 medium) - hopefully the lack of driver support wont nobble it too much going forward
Thats strange, i have an XFX RX 470 4gb and it pulls easily more than 60 fps on warzone, with a mix of medium/high. I know that the 390x should get more performance, but maybe the GPU is not the issue
@@LucasMarquesJ1 hmm, might have to retest then as I haven't played warzone for a few months now. Back to playing Wow instead
I' ve got a similar experience, but on 1440p. A rx470 wasn't powerful enough for that resolution and strangely a r290x is. Also had rx580 and 5600xt and altough they are Both quicker the R9 290x is still a Nice card
7:00 Thats absurd! That framerate is garbage! I can't believe AMD abandoned the R9 cards given that they were out at the same time as Nvidia's 900 series.
Especially when there is a literal disaster with GPU prices.... People will want to buy something cheap that can play the newest titles on low settings and they wont get driver updates...
@@stefanmarinov2864 I think Nvidia users with GeForce 800 and older feel the same because those are also abandoned in terms of driver support. So basically even something like GTX 780, GTX 780-Ti, Titan, Titan Black, and Titan Z which are all decent cards will run new games very bad.
@@youtubeshadowbannedme yeah except that's SLIGHTLY more understandable vs what was the 900 series competitor. To be fair the GTX 760 and 750/Ti are still supported I think because they were maxwell vs Kepler. Which ofc those two cards are still plenty usable in the modern Era tbf
Nvidia stopped support for the 700 series which the 390 was based upon a few years back
I put one of those in my misses pute when it came out - in case I needed a back-up when mine goes - 5 years later and it's never gamed.
I was a proud owner of an R9 290 from 2015-2020 and I must say that throughout the 5 years I owned the card it never disappointed me once. Sure, it ran hot but that’s to be expected from a 275W TFP powerhouse. After I sold mine, I ended up picking up a second one to throw in my secondary gaming PC. Still would be perfect card for budget 1080p gaming (given you can power it) if they didn’t cut off driver support for no reason.
Still rocking my R9 390 XFX Black Edition paired with my little i5 6600, 4x 4GB DDR4 2400MHz RAM Kingston HyperX FURY, Gigabyte Z170X GAMING 3 Mobo, (used to have a be quiet! Dark Rock 3, moved to an NZXT x52, then to my current generic air cooler for £30, after having issues with the NZXT, replacing it twice and not being able to find some assembly pieces for my be quiet). even with the generic air cooler, temps are super cool idle at 20 degrees Celsius and that's with me being generous, can get to 16 degrees Celsius and not going above 48 degrees Celsius under load, and that's me being generous again, usually around 41 degrees. A decent PSU, EVGA G3 850W which is overkill for my entire system
The PC has served me well and i only use for around a week or so per year since 2019. Mostly used it a lot back when I built it in 2016.
Plays most games that I like at 60fps+ at 1080p. Don't see any need to upgrade at the moment.
Though I have to agree I wish AMD still held out support for these cards a bit longer more so just because of fond memories than needing them (I have a 5700xt) that Halo result has to fall solely on the game. That's piss poor performance out of a solid card. They have arbitrarily locked out a number of GPU's that can most definitely run the game and even the ones that have full support are clearly not optimized well enough.
Oh absolutely! Theres no way some good support wouldn’t push these further.. part of why i am always hesitant buying gaming pc’s. Console just kind of last for soooo long.. 🤷♂️
Xbox One lasted basically 6 years, this card is 5 years old before it lost support. The difference? Your Xbox One games will never look better and they are stuck on that console. PC games can be turned up to very high and played on any new hardware you end up buying.
PC is still the better option once GPU prices go back down (Mining will crash next year and cheap cards will be everywhere).
This has nothing to do with the topic I just love your username haha, "Hispanic at the Disco"
Yeah, the blame falls solely on 343, Halo Infinite is incredibly poorly optimized, even my RX 570 barely gets an unstable af 40FPS at 720p low
@@friendofpelicantown lmao thank you bro
I've had the Sapphire R9 390x and i was very happy with it. Until my power supply gave up and burned the card... It's now sitting on the shelf as deco object because i like the look of the sapphire nitro :'D
Same. My PSU couldnt handle my R9 390 as well. At least it is a descent PSU and only the PSU died.. It was a 600W PSU, strange that it died cus my CPU's TDP is 105W... I used the warranty and then sold it and bought Zalman 750W.
The achilles heel of AMD's 200 and 300 series - it *really* needs driver optimisation to do well, hence all of the improvements we were seeing when it was still getting updates. My brother is glad that he has my GTX 970 instead of my HD7970 GHz.
No shit. The 970 is 2 gens newer than the 7970. The 7970 was a GTX 680 competitor.
I remember my laptop with its HD 8870M, that thing gained like 2-5fps per driver update lol. Sadly itt died last year.
@@marcox4358 Similar situation for my laptop with a 1GB M.R. HD5650. It overclocked by 150MHz, and I could switch between original OEM and the last drivers for better performance in OpenGL or DirectX (Minecraft ran at highest settings+far 60fps on OG, barely 40 low+short on last).
That was several years ago however. Last game I played on it was WOWS, and it handled that well at low-medium settings 1366x768 60fps.
@@dabombinablemi6188 mine died playing WoT, WoWs ran very well at 1920x1080(native resolution). Multicore support snd drivers sure helped a lot with fps
@@screwb1882 agreed
Hd series are decade old
I have one. it was the GPU that was originally in my PC that I am typing on right now. I replaced it with a GTX 1080 in 2017 and haven't used it since, but it ran Doom at 4K at good framerates in vulkan with good settings (don't remember specifics, but I think medium something). GTA V at 4K worked too, but it was usually under 60 FPS.
I bought an XFX R9 390x 8GB used in 2017 when my R9 290x went wrong and it has served me very well to this day. I ran it at 1440p for years until 2019 when it was moved into a spare machine running 1080p and still runs really well.
my very first graphics card
I never had this card, but I do have (not in my main system) an R9 280X (rebadge of HD 7970GHz as mentioned in the video) It is awesome. Played so many games so well even into 2018, at 1080p. Love the card to this day and I am confident with driver support it would run Halo Infinite just fine and any games with similar requirements.
no hd7970 not runs halo infinite
Same. I love my 280 as well and if i didn't have my rtx card i would still be fine with using it on 1080p.
i have a 4gb r9 290x tri-x, but since i'm using windows 8 pro (modded by me) i don't have a whql driver since 2014 for it. surprisingly even modern games like need for speed HEAT run at ultra with 60 fps!
bought a r9 270x a few years back for 20 pounds, needless to say it was a great card for the time, though the 1650 super became my primary card a few months later
1650 super is such a gem of a budget card! that one is going to be the rolls royce of budget cards for many years to come and in the second hand market later on! powerful, efficient, great price/performance.
It's funny seeing yet another video saying that AMD's driver support is very poor indeed. When I was looking for a new card, my friend decided to upgrade too, was insisting that he wanted AMD because of Nvidia's BS moves (which they were, they do a lot of BS that's for sure) but also insisted that AMD has gotten much better with their drivers- as did many AMD fans. Yet, many vids showed that their drivers were holding back performance back then and now:
Here we are, a card that's not so old and it's not supported anymore while a card I sold to my cousin; GTX970 IS still supported and he has been enjoying a lot of new games, and it still runs a treat. He streams games with the card's built in NVENC with no problem despite the card being that old. Granted that's if he listens to me and turns off Volumetric lighting >:V
AMD drivers were almost always a disaster on release. RX480 shipping with BIOS that ran out of spec, features being still in development on release, performance issues. I like to believe it's a case of Stockholm syndrome by their customers. But I'm thankful that we have people that are willing to pay AMD to do QA for them, because having a market dominated by one company is not good for everybody involved.
@@kaminekoch.7465 Absolutely, I'm in no way arguing for Nvidia only, competition is always good for us.
Which is why I'm so damned frustrated that AMD just seems to roll with their GPUs being in the biggest consoles and make bank off that on the GPU side of things.
Like, I got their CPU the 3900x and it's fantastic, no complaints. But every time I look at their GPUs, I am just ...no, thank you.
Had 2 laptops many years ago with their GPU tech in, both were super annoying to game on simply because of the drivers and having to bounce between the official ones or 3rd party ...depending on the game.
And I don't think one of my laptops EVER got GPU update, was always 1.0
I allways loved gcn cards for their great compute performance
I'm still using my R9 390 8Gb. XFX brand. My first one was that exact one in your video, Sapphire Nitro. It was a gigantic pile of junk. It lasted 2 weeks and then completely fried out. It was constantly doing black screens and giving be bsod before it died. The XFX brand one has been faithful and serving since I got it. The beefiest fastest card I've ever had. As far as games and performance, it still to this day plays just about every single game I have on steam and epic (this includes AAA games made THIS YEAR) on high and ultra 144hz with nothing below 55fps. The 512bit memory bus is a beast for the high memory intensive games that I don't see a lot of cards have currently. It is a very good card still, imo.
My buddy had a 390 a while back and all I heard from him at the time was that it ran hot and had iffy drivers. Side note, love Jedi Fallen Order in the benchmarks!
I've been using this card since 2017 and I've never had any issues with the kinda of games I play. Even apex legends maxes out at above 60FPS meaning yay. My friends 1060 is on medium low setting and apparently it's the 3GB of VRAM.
Considering I had a 970 back in the day, I thought by this point the 390 would be better seeing as it has much more VRAM, I didn't think AMD would stop supporting these cards so quickly.
not like it is unprecedented, they killed Terascale support pretty quick too
@@virtualtools_3021 yup. Less than 4 years driver support. Back then those with crossfire or dual x2 card got hit the hardest.
@@arenzricodexd4409 the worst part is its kinda planned obsolesence, since you can get modded (forcing later drivers to load) drivers for terascale that have huge improvements in GTA V for example, amd coded the later drivers for a few terascale-containing APUs but refused to officialy release it for the rest of the lineup
@@virtualtools_3021 nah more like AMD did not want to support for a very long time even if some of their future product using those old architecture. But this is the standard hold by majority of hardware maker.
@@arenzricodexd4409 theres no support needed other than not blocking the installation, it could just have a warning that you may experience issues and no support will be granted
Well than indeed
I had an ASUS variant Strix, and the initial experience of the card was fine. It was during the adrenaline drivers where AMD dropped the ball hard. Suddenly many games began to have artifacts that were not in the previous driver version, AMD Wattman was not fully implemented, and there was an earlier version (I think crimson) that didn't turn the fans on... cooking your gpu without a notice. To say that AMD didn't care was an understatement, they just wanted everyone to forget GCN and move to Vega. The final nail in the coffin for me was the Linux instability issues, it took many years to fix AMD's open source drivers only for them to drop support in 2021. It's a nice card overall, but if AMD cared more it would have been a simpler recommendation.
I have the exact same gpu, but whenever there's a graphic stress, my screen turns black and nothing i press does anything. Could the cause of this be the standard power connection to the card? (A single cable splits into two of the ports for gpu)
Or should there be a dedicated cable coming out of the power supply to each port in the gpu?
I have a 750W power supply, so the power is for sure available.
Its around $330 here in America using sights like eBay... at least from what I found.
good cards to compare is probably the GTX 970 and 980 as they can usually be found in a similar price range of £120-£250
I have an r9 290 tri-x and it performs amazing. I mean battlefield 5 everything cranked to ultra. And it dips to 55fps at the lowest. Seige ultra is 120fps. There is that heating issues I will admit but it's fine in the winter. It is at 1080p Bc my monitor is 1080p. But it does insanely well with triple a games. Bare in mind. It is 8 years old
Used one of these up until 2020 when I got a 3080Ti. Sold it for £100 because I'm not a scalping jackass. Great card for 60fps gaming.
R9 390 on Eastern American Ebays is ~$300, that's crazy man. I'm on a Gtx 760 cuz it was the low cost of ~$80
So the GTX 970 which is two years older still gets updates. Seems my bias against ATI graphics cards continues on to AMD.
I was going to upgrade my rx 570 to this card but the rx 570 gets better Minecraft performance and that's all sisters plays so that sucks
It should be mentioned that at CEX you get a replacement first, or you get a proportion of your money back if they can't replace. If after a year it goes, and they have no replacements, you get half your money back.
it goes 7970 7990 then next gen r9 270 r9 280x r9 290x
r9 370 r9 390 amd fury rx 400 and 500 series then vega
How do you get a r9 390 for $150 these day? Ive seen them selling for $300 on ebay.
Now I need to Google where "Slough" is in Great Britain
8GB GDDR5 on 512bit bus in early 2015. Enough Said
Thats bigger than my RTX3090.
You need to get ypur hands on an 980 ti, you will be extremly surprised.
requires a cpu newer then 9700k to use these on 1080p
I had this exact card and it worked just fine for years... Until it died this march. Now i miss it every single day. Goong back to an HD 6950 or using Intel's HD 630 makes me wanna jump of the window any time i feel like playing any game
I know what you mean....
Thought this would be better than a GTX 970
thanks for the up. those are just perfect for winter. gaming and space heater in 1!
When you will build a cheap pc? i miss you doing that :(.
Awesome, discord announcements FTW
Another great video as always. Love your content! Thank you for coming back. We missed you
LESS GO
I had an MSI R9 390 that did well over the years, (I mainly played at 1080p). The drivers were always a sore spot for the card, undermining the performance of it. The other issue was the thermals. Even after a repaste, it would shoot to 94°C whenever load was put on it. It recently died of what I assume was heatdeath, and I upgraded to a 6700xt.
served u well, I have a friend who plays VR on his 390X, it's like a 980TI in some games.
I'll fondly remember my RX 480, what a beast, in my country Nvidia was always king, had so many cheap second hand ATI/AMDs over the years.
I did stick to the Nvidia ones after that legend, driver support is so good, and u can't find AMDs on the market anyway.
My first GPU ever, mine was MSI twin frozr :') missed her so much I regret to have sold her...
i regret selling my old trusty r9 290 tri-x
The good old days of modded drivers :) I fondly remember the Omega Drivers with my previous GPUs !
Can you benchmark this card on Linux with a recent version of Mesa? Since this card is fully supported by the Mesa drivers it would be interesting to see the performance differences.
i would also like to know
Wtf I bought a R9 290 4GB for €200 back in 2014... These are still around?
I got the xfx version of this card from a friend of mine and have been useing it in my main pc since mid 2020. I did have to upgrade my case to one with front fans and mesh to make the card run cool. I don't play a whole lot of new and demanding games, but every game I have thrown at it runs at at least 50 fps some with med settings some with high settings. I'm quite salty about amd ending driver support for it around june of this year, but I will keep useing it until I can afford a card to replace it with which frankly won't be for a few years given the current market conditions and my personal situation. Oh well I've lived with worse pc hardware for the vast majority of my life I'll survive. I mostly play minecraft with the card and I am able to run shaders quite well with it, and its vce does wonders for my recording/streaming for my youtube channel. Tho I've replaced the fans on it once by now.
Absolutely loved this card. I had the PowerColor PCS+ version and I had to modify the BIOS just so the fans would never turn off.
Yeah, could've been done in software but that means I'd have to set that up every time I install an OS.
It was a fantastic performer though, and performed great on Windows, Linux and macOS. Ended up selling it a while ago and now I'm currently enjoying my 6700 XT.
Yooo, I had the same card and model, used it until a few months ago and loved it. Got it back when I was still living with my parents and boy did it heat up my room. Good times. Now using a RTX 3070
I mean there was another card between this and the Fury. The 390x had a few more shaders as well as slightly better clocks. Usually between 5-10% more performance on the x's over the non-x. Having said that GCN being a really good mining architecture and the two mining booms saw these cards never really drop as they should have. The 390x 100% is blow for blow with an rx 480. And the 480 uses less power. So as the 480's dipped in price the 390's should have dipped harder. But because the 480's were sought after mining cards in the first boom, and still well liked in the second boom it made them tougher to come by and drove the prices way up. And similarly the next best thing the 390's also elevated in price. Even when you had the dips (A year and a half ago you could grab 480's sub $100.00 and 470's for $75.00 dollars all day) the 390's really didn't drop below in an appropriate way. And prices have only recently started to fall with the end of life announcement. These cards yeah probably should be like 40 dollar cards right now. But likewise 750ti's probably should be 25 dollar cards right now. The market basically just had a reset where two generations of graphics cards as far as most people are concerned don't exist. And it shot the older cards prices right back where they were before those two generations happened. It's a strange time we live in.
>vs 2022
it's, uh, still 2021 though? :x
Gta 5 is 2013 though. Thanks for making me feel old.
PC and Enhanced versions was a 2015 release.
Had an R9 290x Reference in my first real gaming pc, it was a beast could run most games at high or ultra at 60+fps 1080p, but man it sounded like a vacuumcleaner xD
Those cards still surprise me today. The R9 390x was one of the first 4K capable cards if I remember right. Lovely bit of graphics card history in these 2 cards alone!
"Halo did see performance increase by a little bit"
Literally move than doubled the frame rate 😂
I have a r9 290 but sadly its dead
ayyy i want to see this benchmark
I'm still using my MSI R9 390 Gaming 8G, paired with my Ryzen 5 2400G and 16gb of ram it does quite nicely still. I have it all in a Cooler Master HAF 912 tower, and with two 200mm fans in the front and top, along with 2 100mm fans on the side and rear, I haven't had my R9 past 65 degrees tops. I used to have a water cooled FX 8350 with my R9 390, but found a deal on the Ryzen setup, just still don't have the money for a new graphics card yet.
I had an R9 390 for 2 years. The XFX DD model I had was hot and loud, but it performed well at 1080p. It fell behind at 1440p after a while, and my model didn’t overclock much at all. But the card itself worked fine and I had very little issues with it.
I upgraded to a reference Vega 64 when i managed to luck myself into getting one for 500 euros back when most were going for 800. The Vega 64 was even hotter and louder (but I expected that, it being the reference model), and I had tons of driver issues. Overwatch for example was unplayable for many months due to random crashing.
I then swapped that piece of garbage for a 1080 Ti 6 months later with a miner who was looking for more Vega 64 GPUs. That 1080 Ti has been one of the best cards I’ve ever owned.
If it weren't for the need for a HDMI 2.1 graphics card, I would have kept my R9 390 8GB for much longer than I did. AMD's card still played games surprisingly well by the time I replaced it during the height of the pandemic.
I got rid of my R9 390 for $300 and I went and bought a EVGA GTX 980 4gb for $280 the card is awesome for VR but with the newer games I shouldn't have to install modified drivers and figure if a game will work for benchmarking
Move to Linux and game on.
I had a GB WF3 R9 290, pretty happy with its BF4 Performance when Mantle/New APIs were coming in, played every game I needed to, but my core temps were always pretty high in Australia Summertime, I swapped it for a GTX970 3.5GB for lower temps (15-20*c cooler) and similar enough performance.
I did love messing with AMD VSR features, overlay game tweaks to color and vibrances, beyond high temps I'd have kept it.
i am using an 8 year old R9 290 tri-x OC and its been holding up amazing, doesn't react too well to any overclocking, but it isn't needed as it does any game 1080p medium at 60fps+
i shocked that my RX 570 is way over 1000 USD now early this year is was bit cheaper Newest haio Plays in 1080p 30 to 40FPS R9 i wanted that card back in the day but i like Nnvida back then but this year going with AMD card i might never go back lol I still think them R9 Looks cool
Never used a laptop or PC after my Acer aspire 3000 in 2002, when limewire and bearshare was the hot thing
.after that in 2007 I moved to the iphone and galaxy and never owned a laptop
I even game on the galaxy s20, I play war robots
I watch your channel because of your personality
I was hoping to get a R9 390 but i ddimt have the 140€ at the time (the same model in the video, clean and in box). As soon as i got paid the listing said sold. Was lucky enough and got a GTX 970 ITX for 65€. The seller wanted 100 but because i helped him alot he dropped the price.
Funny enough the seller got the card for 20€ and its workimg and hasnt been wrecked. Even tho the fan on the heatsink was busted
There's a 290X paired with a 1600 in my brothers build and he still pretty content about it. If the game uses most recent API's, it's really good which can sometimes be about 980, otherwise it does struggle sometimes.
I have the r9 380x wich delivers the same performance in halo infinite all because of amd beeing lazy, it's kinda crazy, all because of "we want you to buy new products" policy
Very decent card overall, but my MSI blower variant shipped with a borked fan curve. The card would heat up to 80C where the fan would laaazily begin ramping up, almost never in time to stop the card from overheating and shutting down. This can easily be fixed in Afterburner, but what an insane flaw to ship the card with!
I wonder if I should sell it while the prices are still ridiculous, as I imagine - another year, and this card will be worthless.
If amd is not going to provide cards @ msrp, at least they should give us updated drivers once a year for all those old cards that can still handle gaming loads.
Seems like a great card to use as a stopgap until the new cards are plenty available and aren't still getting scalped.snapped. Hopefully MS will do something about Halo Infinite since the card seems like it should have no trouble handling it.
Had one, hated it, it was too hot and didn't overclock at all for me. Got a RX480 OCd to 1370mhz and haven't had any problems with heat since.
I picked one up last week for £70 here in the UK to use with davinchi resolve, the 8gb vram is perfect for that usage!
r9 390 8gb 150$ LOL were?
i sold mine for 270€ paid 70€ for it in 2020 from a friend who had 6 of them (he sold the others for 80€ to a cash shop) and one to a other friend for 50€ i also sold my friends one for 270€ and got him a rx6700xt for 500€