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[JayzTwoCents] R9 390 vs GTX970 - Claims 300 series is NOT a rebrand - R9 390 new mid tier king?

TrigrH

Precisely: they never even considered introducing a 400 bucks card which is rather greedy on their part: they just wanna push people to just spend more on the 980 instead of giving decent price options.

 

And AMD has now given us the best $400 range GPU on the market; the 390x at $429 which can easily hang with a 980 but costs $70 less. ;)

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You can believe whatever you want, but it's still not going to make it true. There is no price hike, period. 390 launched at $329 while the 290 launched at $399. 390x launched at $429 while 290x launched at $549. I've already explained to you the way retail products are priced and you're choosing to ignore because you prefer your tantrum induced reasoning.

 

Were you this angry when Haswell was refreshed for exactly the same price?

Can't help it. If they want to expect AMD to sell the 390(X) only barely above the bottom price of the 290(X) then let them, no point in arguing after nobody has budged. 

 

I don't expect AMD to base their cost off of a card that had many price cuts due to the release of Maxwell. The current price makes sense to me

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...the performance should be the big indicator of the price. All of this additional points are null and void if it doesn't actually means that the card performs significantly better to justify the 40% price increase. 

 

The performance is an indicator of the price. Look:

 

390 = or slightly > 970 and is priced the same as a 970.

390x = or slightly < 980 and is priced $70 less than 980. 

 

The price matches the performance. 

 

There is no price increase. You're comparing current SALE prices of the previous gen to LAUNCH MSRP of the new products. Your comparison is flawed.

 

Asked and answer please move on to someone else's comments.

 

Just trying to help you see and understand that there has been no price increase and that the 390 prices are completely justified as new products.

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No I actually said on that post that 20 to 40 bucks price increase would have been ok and even as far as 60 to 80 if we eventually get more vram intensive games (which we might, sadly devs suck at porting games they will get lazy and not properly handle textures and such) But the price increase was way too much for what we're getting here: barely any better performance.

So... 50 bucks is way too much?

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Good news for the consumers. 

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3) Useless 4gb of extra ram no game can use since it would run into performance problem before it runs out of vram. I already gave you a significant better argument: better vram speeds.

 

Modded Skyrim. Bam! Argument destroyed. Wooooooooooo!

 

Being serious though, I'm considering the 390 because I need a card with more than 4gb vram (pretty much entirely to run Skyrim without stuttering. The terribly awful stuttering) and it's the cheapest option. The 290x 8gb is still around $350+ used and Nvidia's only offerings with that much vram are the titans (even the original is still stupidly expensive used) and the 980Ti which are far outside my budget.

You know what's easier than buying and building a brand new PC? Petty larceny!
If you're worried about getting caught, here's a trick: Only steal one part at a time. Plenty of people will call the cops because somebody stole their computer -- nobody calls the cops because they're "pretty sure the dirty-bathrobe guy from next door jacked my heat sink."

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Really? Didn't the 8gb 290x and 390x cost the same?

Current cheapest 290x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-video-card-r9290x8dfd

Current cheapest 390x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-video-card-r9390xgaming8g

The only differences between the 200 series and 300 series are Price and HBM, neither of which affect performance in any way. There is also a driver tweak AMD did for the 300 series that improves some types of performance; users have already made it work on the 200 series.

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Modded Skyrim. Bam! Argument destroyed. Wooooooooooo!

 

Being serious though, I'm considering the 390 because I need a card with more than 4gb vram (pretty much entirely to run Skyrim without stuttering. The terribly awful stuttering) and it's the cheapest option. The 290x 8gb is still around $350+ used and Nvidia's only offerings with that much vram are the titans (even the original is still stupidly expensive used) and the 980Ti which are far outside my budget.

That's a valid point-my 970 is struggling a bit with Skyrim, I'm having to reduce the amount of graphics mods so that around 3GB vRAM is being used.

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

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Current cheapest 290x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-video-card-r9290x8dfd

Current cheapest 390x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-video-card-r9390xgaming8g

The only differences between the 200 series and 300 series are Price and HBM, neither of which affect performance in any way. There is also a driver tweak AMD did for the 300 series that improves some types of performance; users have already made it work on the 200 series.

^That's what I've been saying for a while, but people keep on ignoring me and saying that its not a straight up rebrand, when AMD only needed to use better components and use better drivers to increase the perofrmance.

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
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^That's what I've been saying for a while, but people keep on ignoring me and saying that its not a straight up rebrand, when AMD only needed to use better components and use better drivers to increase the perofrmance.

Did you watch the video?

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Did you watch the video?

Yes, and what I've said still stands.

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
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That's a valid point-my 970 is struggling a bit with Skyrim, I'm having to reduce the amount of graphics mods so that around 3GB vRAM is being used.

It was a funny way I found out. For a few days I was having occasional crashes on loading screens, nothing too bad, maybe once an hour or so. Then looking through different enbs on the nexus I found out that I hadn't edited an .ini file properly when I installed the enbseries. It was the one that determines how much ram it's allowed to use (just vram or system ram as well). It was set to 4gb, or what my card had in vram. I bumped it up a bit and haven't had a single crash since, but at the same time I started getting horrible stuttering when objects popped in. So caves/dungeons/towns are fine, empty areas like whiterun are ok, but forested areas like riften or falkreath are a no go or it's stutter city. 

 

^That's what I've been saying for a while, but people keep on ignoring me and saying that its not a straight up rebrand, when AMD only needed to use better components and use better drivers to increase the perofrmance.

Hey, if Nvidia can take a card, decrease it's bus width, then sell it as a new card altogether and it's not a rebrand, then these aren't rebrands either :P

You know what's easier than buying and building a brand new PC? Petty larceny!
If you're worried about getting caught, here's a trick: Only steal one part at a time. Plenty of people will call the cops because somebody stole their computer -- nobody calls the cops because they're "pretty sure the dirty-bathrobe guy from next door jacked my heat sink."

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Current cheapest 290x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-video-card-r9290x8dfd

Current cheapest 390x 8Gb - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-video-card-r9390xgaming8g

The only differences between the 200 series and 300 series are Price and HBM, neither of which affect performance in any way. There is also a driver tweak AMD did for the 300 series that improves some types of performance; users have already made it work on the 200 series.

 

^That's what I've been saying for a while, but people keep on ignoring me and saying that its not a straight up rebrand, when AMD only needed to use better components and use better drivers to increase the perofrmance.

 

pcper did a test on those drivers:  http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards/AMD-Catalyst-155-1515-Performance-Check-Validating-AMD-R9-390-Testing

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It was a funny way I found out. For a few days I was having occasional crashes on loading screens, nothing too bad, maybe once an hour or so. Then looking through different enbs on the nexus I found out that I hadn't edited an .ini file properly when I installed the enbseries. It was the one that determines how much ram it's allowed to use (just vram or system ram as well). It was set to 4gb, or what my card had in vram. I bumped it up a bit and haven't had a single crash since, but at the same time I started getting horrible stuttering when objects popped in. So caves/dungeons/towns are fine, empty areas like whiterun are ok, but forested areas like riften or falkreath are a no go or it's stutter city. 

 

Hey, if Nvidia can take a card, decrease it's bus width, then sell it as a new card altogether and it's not a rebrand, then these aren't rebrands either :P

Nvidia bumped the cards down 1 tier, they didn't keep them as the same damn spot among the next 'generation' of cards. (Eg. GXT 680, GTX 770).

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
PMSL

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"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
PMSL

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Nvidia bumped the cards down 1 tier, they didn't keep them as the same damn spot among the next 'generation' of cards. (Eg. GXT 680, GTX 770).

Nah, it was like the 450ti to the 550ti or something like that. They dropped the bus width from 192-bit to 128-bit and sold it as a new card without moving it down a notch. Just poking fun anyways. :P

You know what's easier than buying and building a brand new PC? Petty larceny!
If you're worried about getting caught, here's a trick: Only steal one part at a time. Plenty of people will call the cops because somebody stole their computer -- nobody calls the cops because they're "pretty sure the dirty-bathrobe guy from next door jacked my heat sink."

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Nah, it was like the 450ti to the 550ti or something like that. They dropped the bus width from 192-bit to 128-bit and sold it as a new card without moving it down a notch. Just poking fun anyways. :P

I was going to say, the 450 ti isn't even a card, that would be the very different 450 GTS 

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
PMSL

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That's a very small sample.

 

Well... Whatever you say...

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That's a valid point-my 970 is struggling a bit with Skyrim, I'm having to reduce the amount of graphics mods so that around 3GB vRAM is being used.

And not all 970 can use all 4Gb either, one of the areas cut to make it the lower tier to the 980 was that the last Ram (500Mb) chip on the 970 would be one of the B grades not approved to be put on the 980. Some cards will be fine and 4Gb is all good but some will only have 3.5Gb that is usable.

But Nvidia's advertising a 4Gb card without saying 500Mbs on it is a shot in the dark is far more forgivable than AMD's using better quality components and updating a driver calling it a brand new card. That's like saying Windows 8 and 8.1 are different operating systems.

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I was going to say, the 450 ti isn't even a card, that would be the very different 450 GTS 

Have it written down somewhere, I'll try to find it.
 

And not all 970 can use all 4Gb either, one of the areas cut to make it the lower tier to the 980 was that the last Ram (500Mb) chip on the 970 would be one of the B grades not approved to be put on the 980. Some cards will be fine and 4Gb is all good but some will only have 3.5Gb that is usable.

But Nvidia's advertising a 4Gb card without saying 500Mbs on it is a shot in the dark is far more forgivable than AMD's using better quality components and updating a driver calling it a brand new card. That's like saying Windows 8 and 8.1 are different operating systems.

There's much more to the whole 970 vram problem than that. You can use all of it constantly and never run into an issue, or you can run into problems constantly. There's no number that if you go over it you will have problems, that doesn't mean there isn't a problem of course, but it isn't nearly as big as some people like to say, and it does exist unlike what others would want to tell you.

 

Basically, it's complicated. But it is a 4gb card and it can use all 4gb of it.

 

Edit: Also the whole 'some cards have 4gb, some have 3.5gb' is bull. Whoever said that is either lying, or doesn't know what they're talking about.

You know what's easier than buying and building a brand new PC? Petty larceny!
If you're worried about getting caught, here's a trick: Only steal one part at a time. Plenty of people will call the cops because somebody stole their computer -- nobody calls the cops because they're "pretty sure the dirty-bathrobe guy from next door jacked my heat sink."

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And not all 970 can use all 4Gb either, one of the areas cut to make it the lower tier to the 980 was that the last Ram (500Mb) chip on the 970 would be one of the B grades not approved to be put on the 980. Some cards will be fine and 4Gb is all good but some will only have 3.5Gb that is usable.

But Nvidia's advertising a 4Gb card without saying 500Mbs on it is a shot in the dark is far more forgivable than AMD's using better quality components and updating a driver calling it a brand new card. That's like saying Windows 8 and 8.1 are different operating systems.

While I'm not happy with Nvidia lying like that, AMD is persisting with the fact that their cards aren't rebadges, even when its quite obvious that they are. Nvidia did not repeatedly say that nothing was wrong with the GTX 970's vRAM when it was quite obvious that there is a problem.

"We also blind small animals with cosmetics.
We do not sell cosmetics. We just blind animals."

 

"Please don't mistake us for Equifax. Those fuckers are evil"

 

This PSA brought to you by Equifacks.
PMSL

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Actually simply put is the price difference.

 

Is the 390X worth $50+ more than the 290X (New) for any reason what-so-ever. Yes Only if Brand New.

 

Is the 390 worth $329 though? Possibly. It goes head to head with the 970 but with 8 Gigs Vram.

 

So out of both cards the only decent card is the 390 as far as value goes.

 

USED......  Much better price.

 

However, you could justify buying someone's used 290X around $200-300 though?

 

I'm seeing the MSI Lightning on Ebay for $300 or best offer.

 

I also see a Sapphire 290X 4 Gb Tri-X at $220 starting bid - that really went down recently.  (This GPU was used lightly for about 2 months, not overclocked beyond factory.)

 

Those were more money when I bought my GTX 770 4 Gb card.

 

I also see a NEW 290X 8 Gb card for around $380. I don't think that is worth the price though since the 390X is out. I would have to go lower in order for it to make any sense to justify $50. Might as well go for the one that will resell better.

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1) It did not lead to better thermals: The thermals on the 390x are the same as the thermals on non reference 290x cards since well, it skipped the stupid reference cooler this time around

 

2) The gains are marginal and not reflected in performance. 

 

3) Useless 4gb of extra ram no game can use since it would run into performance problem before it runs out of vram. I already gave you a significant better argument: better vram speeds.

 

Let's get something clear here: I disagree with your views and reasoning cause I believe that for barely improved products, the performance should be the big indicator of the price. All of this additional points are null and void if it doesn't actually means that the card performs significantly better to justify the 40% price increase. 

 

Not sure where the 40% increase you claim comes from... unless you are talking buying them second hand of like ebay, clearance stock sale? MIR I do not consider since my out of pocket cost at most retailers do not offer MIR at all.

 

Average price for a R9 290 is $290 (between $280-$300), while the average price for a R9 390 is $340 ($330-$350), that is a $40 average difference in price. That is roughly 17% average price increase.

 

Average price for R9 290X is $360 (between $330-$390, price average wildly between AMDs "shit reference design" and custom PCB/Cooling/Power delivery of the 290X needed to get decent cooling)

Average for R9 390X is $430 atm of writing and this pretty much the same across most vendors(since AMD reference design is pretty much as good as it needs to be, hence the higher price for the cooler and vram). So average price increase would be $70, which is about average 19%.

 

Pretty much the price increase is according to what AMD has improved upon, the additional cost of the better coolers (as you mentioned) and increased vram/speed falls in line of those prices. In grand scheme of things, the price hike is not high as you claim it to be.

 

Do you need 8GB vram, 90% at a time you do not, but there are games like Dying Light, GTA5, Shadow of Mordor that can cache and approach 4GB in many situations at 1080p maxed out everything settings, and it exceeds at 1440p, and definitely at 4K . One example here GTA5

Not saying that you need 8GB vram to play the games, hell even 2GB vram can run it, but having excess vram can reduce those stutters one can experience when the VRAM is being dumped to load new data. But more vram really does not improve performance (there are exceptions) otherwise, just makes it smoother. Just like G-Sync/Freesync, it makes it smoother, gives you a perception of better performance.

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I can run GTA 5 with my 560 which has 1 GB of VRAM.

 

Ha!

 

60fps medium settings + sweetFX and some other stuff.

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I can run GTA 5 with my 560 which has 1 GB of VRAM.

 

Ha!

 

60fps medium settings + sweetFX and some other stuff.

 

I don't doubt it one bit that is playable :-)

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