See also: What’s the best graphics card? With the Radeon R9 390X, AMD aims to cater to the needs of high resolution gaming above 1080p resolutions. This means smooth playback should be achievable at 2560×1440 and above. Unlike many graphics cards featuring sophisticated third party coolers, the XFX card runs at the stock core clock speed of 1,050MHz making it the only card in our group test which hasn’t been factory overclocked. This should be kept in mind when viewing the performance figures as we haven’t attempted to overclock the card manually. This is a slightly faster clock speed than a standard Radeon R9 390 and the performance is further increased by increasing the number of stream processors from 2,560 to 2,816 although the memory performance remains unchanged.
XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation Core Edition review: performance
Therefore, this R9 390X-based XFX card does outperform the R9 390 royalQueen from Club 3D, but only by a very small amount. In our tests, the gap is often only a couple of frames per second. For example, we see the R9 390 product achieving an average of 113.4 fps from Grand Theft Auto 5 at 1080p high quality, while the R9 390X of the XFX card improves this to only 116.5. Despite it’s close performance results to the cheaper card, we were pleased to see frame rates of around 80 frames per second from Bioshock Infinite at 2560×1440 pixels Ultra quality. Also, the XFX model runs considerably quieter and, at the time of writing, can be found for only £21 more making it a pretty good deal in our books. The XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation Core Edition is undoubtedly the better card and in the end it’s not just about raw frame rates. On the other hand, stepping up to the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G would gain you only a little more speed, but cost you an additional £100. If the XFX R9 390X card had been pitted against a standard GeForce GTX 980 it would have been a closer fight, with the AMD card occasionally coming out on top, but the overclocked cores MSI board help it to hold onto its lead. The Radeon R9 390X comes as standard with a huge 8GB of RAM as compared to 4GB on the Nvidia GeForce GTX980. There aren’t many games which can take advantage of this currently, but there’s still potential for the AMD card to make some gains with future titles. The XFX card lacks the finesse and application support of some of the competition but we feel it mounts a successful challenge to the GTX 980.
