Performance & driversĪny Radeon R9 390 in most scenarios will be performing roughly at GeForce GTX 970 upwards to the 980 performance wise, if priced right that is a pretty okay position to be in. So yeah, it's not great to have a GPU consuming that much power, but it could have been a lot worse. With two cards we think an 800~900 Watt PSU would be sufficient. That TDP will make running multi-GPU solutions a bit more complicated. I think enthusiast consumers at this performance level will not mind that much about the power draw and be forgiving. That is OK, and could have been worse but not rather impressive. The card is rated by us having roughly a 280~300 Watt peak power consumption (average is lower). Power consumption is not bad but again not good either. We rated this product at 41 DBa under gaming load measured at 75 cm distance, these are very normal noise levels You can hear a bit of airflow, but that's it. This triple-slot design cools terrific, expect to hover in the 65 to 70 Degrees C domain depending on the airflow inside your system and the ambient temperature. The cooler on the PCS+ will make a significant difference.
The reference Hawaii GPU cooled products in the initial 290 reference series were to be considered really average at 95 Degrees C, that is different for the 390 series. The performance difference remains relative to the 290 series, AMD released optimized drivers, but they only work on the 390 series and not 290, which raises questions. All that combined with its overall performance makes it an interesting graphics card. The PowerColor Radeon R9-390 PCS+ is terrific in many ways, has very decent looks, albeit the triple slot cooler is rather bulky, it is relatively inaudible and offers good maximum temps. Other than that the changes from the board partners are maybe a new PCB and cooling. We'll state it in all our 390 reviews, we very much doubt the benefits from the extra 4 GB, the number of scenarios where you will pass 4 GB is extremely limited. The most substantial noticeable gain is a move from 4 GB towards 8 GB of graphics memory. The memory is clocked faster at an effective data-rate of 6 GHz.
The differences are to be found merely in a small bump in the GPU clock frequency. It is however the latest iteration of the ASIC that allows for slightly higher clocks overall. The Hawaii, or Grenada GPU as AMD likes to call it now, is pretty much the same GPU used in the 290 series with the same thermal characteristics, the same number of shader processors and, well, same everything. The "new" Radeon R9 390 series is interesting from several points of view, both positive and negative.