r9 290x vs GTX 970 vs r9 390(x)

[Ezo Legendz]

I live in the netherland and ive already built my pc the only thing missing is the GPU and i have done a lot of research but i still cant decide.
I can buy a second hand R9 290x for 200 euro.
I can buy a new gtx 970 for 400.
The r9 300 series release on june 16th are they going to be worth it

 

[Derza10]

I think your best bet is to wait a few days till r9 300 series are released and check out the benchmarks / official specs before you decide on anything.

 

[redgarl]

Who knows for now... just wait until next week.

 

[MarkW]

Ask the question about the R9 300 series cards in a week or two. Right now, we have supposed leaks that cannot be verified.

The announcement for the 300 series cards will be this coming Monday, June 16. Then we get into rumorville... Rumored availability date is June 24th. If that is the case, it is likely that we will not get benchmarks until June 24th. All we can do right now is wait for confirmation of specs and prices, and then benchmarks. If these rumored dates are right, we are no more than 12 days away from being able to buy these.

There have been numerous leaks by AMD partners showing various custom built 300 series boards. So it is likely that they have had these all laid out and the chips and boards ready to go for some time now. They were just waiting for the E3 gaming convention next week to launch it all.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Ask the question about the R9 300 series cards in a week or two. Right now, we have supposed leaks that cannot be verified.

The announcement for the 300 series cards will be this coming Monday, June 16. Then we get into rumorville... Rumored availability date is June 24th. If that is the case, it is likely that we will not get benchmarks until June 24th. All we can do right now is wait for confirmation of specs and prices, and then benchmarks. If these rumored dates are right, we are no more than 12 days away from being able to buy these.

There have been numerous leaks by AMD partners showing various custom built 300 series boards. So it is likely that they have had these all laid out and the chips and boards ready to go for some time now. They were just waiting for the E3 gaming convention next week to launch it all.

XFX leaked images of the R9 390x and it looks to be a rebrand of Hawaii XT (R9 290x) with 8GB of VRAM and a higher clock.

If that is true then they are the same card and the 8GB of VRAM will be nice for games at much higher resolutions but it wont perform much better.

Waiting till the 16th is the best option as all it can do is give you a better price on one of the options.

 

[MarkW]

All of the 300 series are likely to be tweaked series 200 chips. The 390X is rumored to get a 50MHz increase in speed, and double the memory.

The entire mobile line was a re-brand. So I do not expect the desktop chips to be any different.

The only entirely new cards will be the Fury's. But with the new aggressive clocking and memory capacities, plus aggressive pricing, things are bound to get interesting in a hurry.

Next summer is when it really gets interesting though. All of the video cards will be going to 14nm or 16nm, so thats a pretty big shrink from 28nm now, and at least the upper level cards will be going to HBMv2. HBM will gain DDR (double data rate) like desktop memory has, so it will double its speed, even if nothing else changes, and other things will be changing. AMD has already said that the 4 layer HBM on the Fury cards can be increased to 16 layers, and that more than 4 stacks are possible as well. So if we go to 16 layers, you suddenly have 4GB per stack, and if you go to 8 stacks, you end up with 32GB with a 8192 bit wide bus, and just multiplying out the expected 512GB bandwidth on the Fury cards, you end up at 2TB memory bandwidth, which is flat out wild.

 

[jimmysmitty]

All of the 300 series are likely to be tweaked series 200 chips. The 390X is rumored to get a 50MHz increase in speed, and double the memory.

The entire mobile line was a re-brand. So I do not expect the desktop chips to be any different.

The only entirely new cards will be the Fury's. But with the new aggressive clocking and memory capacities, plus aggressive pricing, things are bound to get interesting in a hurry.

Next summer is when it really gets interesting though. All of the video cards will be going to 14nm or 16nm, so thats a pretty big shrink from 28nm now, and at least the upper level cards will be going to HBMv2. HBM will gain DDR (double data rate) like desktop memory has, so it will double its speed, even if nothing else changes, and other things will be changing. AMD has already said that the 4 layer HBM on the Fury cards can be increased to 16 layers, and that more than 4 stacks are possible as well. So if we go to 16 layers, you suddenly have 4GB per stack, and if you go to 8 stacks, you end up with 32GB with a 8192 bit wide bus, and just multiplying out the expected 512MB bandwidth on the Fury cards, you end up at 2GB memory bandwidth, which is flat out wild.

You mean 2TB/s bandwidth. GPUs are already in the GB/s. Which will be nice but it will be much like PCIe, lots of potential but no utilization yet. Of course with DX12 and all the new game engines from the big boys (Unreal Engine 4.8, Source 2.0 etc) we might start to see utilization of the big bandwidth jumps we have seen in the past few years.

I am half tempted to wait till next year for a new GPU but my HD7970GHz is just a bit too old. Had it since release so it has served its purpose.

 

[MarkW]

You're right... The Fury cards will have 512GB/s if the rumors are true, and the math says they are, and then the cards next year could have 2TB/s memory bandwidth.

 

[MarkW]

NEWS FLASH! AMD 300 series cards arriving at one retailer today for availability June 21...

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-300-series-arriving-retailers-today/

Its probably some vendor out in the Antarctic... LOL