I have an R9 390X 8G in my current rig, is it possible to upgrade for less than $1000+ or should I just stick with this card for now?

InkTide · April 23, 2021

I'm planning a full-ish system upgrade based around a Ryzen 7 5800X. Currently I have an FX-6300. Yes, I know, it stinks - I do have it OCed to 4.0GHz though, and had it at 4.2 for a while before a few brown-outs (yey rural America infrastructure) bricked a couple of PSUs and at least one motherboard, so I dialed back the OC to reduce wear on the CPU. The R9 390X I have is actually something MSI sent me by mistake when I RMA'd my motherboard, the one they sent bricked itself after a single power cycle, then I RMA'd it again and got mailed an R9 390X instead. I kept the card and got a new motherboard later, but that's a whole other story lol.

It's likely my 390X is refurbished, but I've not had any issues with it in 4+ years of use. Should I keep using it and upgrade pretty much everything else, or is there a newer card I can replace it with that won't eat over a third of my entire budget?

MAXXPRO · April 23, 2021

6 minutes ago, InkTide said:

I'm planning a full-ish system upgrade based around a Ryzen 7 5800X. Currently I have an FX-6300. Yes, I know, it stinks - I do have it OCed to 4.0GHz though, and had it at 4.2 for a while before a few brown-outs (yey rural America infrastructure) bricked a couple of PSUs and at least one motherboard, so I dialed back the OC to reduce wear on the CPU. The R9 390X I have is actually something MSI sent me by mistake when I RMA'd my motherboard, the one they sent bricked itself after a single power cycle, then I RMA'd it again and got mailed an R9 390X instead. I kept the card and got a new motherboard later, but that's a whole other story lol.

It's likely my 390X is refurbished, but I've not had any issues with it in 4+ years of use. Should I keep using it and upgrade pretty much everything else, or is there a newer card I can replace it with that won't eat over a third of my entire budget?

just stick with that card until mid 2022

Chris Pratt · April 23, 2021

A $1000 is enough to get a better card, but you can likely only get something in the 10-series or maybe a low end 20-series with Nvidia and something roughly equivalent on the AMD side. In other words, it would be an upgrade, but you'd be vastly overpaying for it, and it wouldn't be anything current.

It would be far better to just wait. Eventually the market will correct itself, and you'll be able to get far more bang for your buck. It's likely going to be another year, but unless you just have to have a GPU (like your current one breaks or something) it's just not worth being impatient.

InkTide · April 23, 2021

58 minutes ago, Chris Pratt said:

A $1000 is enough to get a better card, but you can likely only get something in the 10-series or maybe a low end 20-series with Nvidia and something roughly equivalent on the AMD side. In other words, it would be an upgrade, but you'd be vastly overpaying for it, and it wouldn't be anything current.

It would be far better to just wait. Eventually the market will correct itself, and you'll be able to get far more bang for your buck. It's likely going to be another year, but unless you just have to have a GPU (like your current one breaks or something) it's just not worth being impatient.

Would an X570 board and 5800X play nicely with the 390X? It is an old card design, I'm honestly a bit concerned about driver issues.

Bitter · April 23, 2021

Repaste and repad the R9 and just roll with it for a while until you can score something at a normal reasonable price. I'm running a Vega56 and could not be happier with it!