MSI R9 390X 8G Review

Vegetable · December 27, 2015

Sup guys

Just got my 390x a few days ago, and I must say, I'm in love. It's a gigantic upgrade from my Gtx 570, and a switch to team red.

Let's go ahead and start with the basics:

It has MSI's "New Twin Frozr V" cooler, which is basically a facelift on the original Twin Frozr V. It has an LED MSI logo on the top of the card, that is barely customizable with the MSI Gaming App. You can set it to "breathe" where it slowly turns on and off with a very un-smooth transition between, flash where it just pops on for a half a second and turns off in what feels like a random pattern, double flash which is the afforementioned flash, but twice in quick secession, and random, which quite literally does any of the 3 in any order with no specific interval between them. In my opinion, they all look like crap. I prefer to just leave the LED logo on 24/7, as it looks MUCH better than the jumbled mess they dare call "animations" to the LED. And to continue, the MSI Gaming App is TERRIBLE. It is sluggish at best, with most of the time when you click something, it either doesn't do anything or does something completely different. REALLY MSI? It also has some horribly vague "modes" to set your GPU in. These include: Quiet, Gaming, and Overclocking. Quiet doesn't do anything as far as I can tell. It just locks the core clock at 1049 mhz and makes the fan run at the default fan curve the GPU has out of the box. Then there's gaming, which basically lets the GPU function as it does with no sort of overclocking tool or fan modifier effecting it whatsoever. Here's the good part.... Overclocking mode is the final mode MSI Gaming App has to offer. Let's just say, it's broken as fuck. It tries to set the GPU to 1100mhz, but in my case, it didn't do anything with the voltage, causing instability in almost every game. I'm not sure if it's just me, but the MSI Gaming App doesn't even seem worth fucking with. 0/10 stay away.

Now on to the GPU itself. (I have nothing but my phone to take pictures with, so unless you guys REALLY want them, I'm just going to post what I had originally planned.) The card itself is glorious. It's massive as hell, and has a decent looking backplate on it. It only takes up 2 PCI brackets, but the card itself is larger than a dual slot card. It's more of a 2.5 slot card, so be aware of that. The card only needs an 8 pin and a 6 pin PCIe power connector, so that's a thumbs up. It's got the typical red/black MSI color scheme you'd expect, and that's about it. It has the Zero Frozr thing that gets talked about a lot, which makes the fans not even spin until the GPU reaches 60*C. It's nice and all, BUT after about 15-20 minutes of use just browsing the LTT forums, it gets above that, so the fans sit at about 12-20%. Although my case isn't fantastic on airflow either, so your mileage may vary on that one. It's the quietest GPU I've ever played with, so the fact that it doesn't really stay off all the time isn't a big deal (to me at least.) It runs decently cool during gaming, the hottest I've recorded was 79*C with the default fan curve, and as I've mentioned, is SUPER quiet, and even at about 50% I can't hear it over my stock Intel heatsink. I used MSI Afterburner for overclocking, and I must say, this thing did HORRIBLY. I DO have the "LE" or Lite Edition, which basically isn't binned as high, and it's default core clock is 1055, instead of 1100 with the normal 390x 8G. It had no problems getting to 1130 on the core, and passed with flying colors until I ran 3dmark Firestrike Ultra, in which it artifacted heavily, and actually wasn't stable until I lowered it way down to 1075 mhz. The memory was also terrible, and was actually not stable with even an extra 5 mhz, which would make it 1505 mhz. I can safely say this is no lottery winner folks.

(Before you say anything, yes I know the voltage/power limit(s) aren't maxed out, this is because any higher had 0 benefit to the core or memory's overclocking, and just made the card run hotter.)

BUT, how does it perform you ask?

3dMark:

Fire Strike Ultra: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9937602?

Fire Strike Extreme: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9937673?

Fire Strike: http://www.3dmark.com/3dm/9937714?

Bioshock Infinite:

Unigine Valley:

Unigine Heaven: HEAVEN AND VALLEY ARE ON DRUGS. I run windows 10 and this is an 8gb card. Those 2 just did a line of cocaine before the benches obviously.

Summary:

The R9 390X 8G by MSI is a solid card. It performs pretty well, and runs quiet. It has full Afterburner support, which is great considering how fantastic Afterburner is to begin with. It has 8 whole gigabytes of VRAM, which is enough for Crossfire 390x's at 4k and STILL have some to spare. I only payed $399.99 for mine, and it actually outperforms the Gtx 980 in a few situations. I strongly recommend this card, and hopefully you will have better luck on the silicon lottery than I did. (lol) Any questions, PLEASE ask away