MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G Review

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The MSI R9 390X GAMING 8G is on the test bench at Vortez this afternoon. For comparison purposes, you can see our evaluation here.

Against the 290X to which the 390X supersedes, we have an extra 4GB of GDDR5, an additional 1100MHz on the memory clock and an extra 100MHz for the core clock. This graphics card is designed for high-resolution gaming with the idea being that it will be ideally suited to pair up with a 4K monitor.
 
The review seems odd since they use the Cat 15.15 drivers for the R9 390X as expected but use the ancient Cat 14.3 drivers for the R9 290X. They even made a point about it saying:

For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results.

The latest certified drivers for the R9 290X should be 14.12. The latest beta drivers likely at the test phase of their review would have been 15.5 beta. Using the old 14.3 drivers likely led to the R9 290X bring up the rear in their review.

With many people interested in seeing how the R9 390X compared to the older R9 290X, Vortez's review is doing readers a disservice by essentially crippling the R9 290X's performace.

Brent's review here on [H] was fair and better done.
 
There is something dodgy going on with quite a few of those tests.
 
I tried the latest beta's on my new 290x and had no end of problems with the machine locking up coming out of sleep. I went back to the december release 14.'s.
 
Is it just me, or is the 290x handling the heavy hits way better than the 390x ?

The heavier the load, the closer the two cards become and it's not by a small margin!
 
I tried the latest beta's on my new 290x and had no end of problems with the machine locking up coming out of sleep. I went back to the december release 14.'s.

Not sure about 15.5 or 15.6 betas but my wife's R9 290 is running 15.4.1 beta without issue. My R9 290 is currently still using 13.12 since every certified driver since then will auto-minimize my windows on my HX950 TV when I change inputs or turn the TV off. The only problem I have with 13.12 is that while it works flawlessly with my R9 270, it will give me a BSOD once every few weeks when using my R9 290.

I found that my wife's rig running 15.4 beta doesn't do that so I will probably update to 15.6 beta in the next few days to test.
 
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