AMD is releasing a 4GB variant of the R9 390 by telling its partners to sell the GPU with half the VRAM and reduced price. The R9 390 was initially released with 8GB of video memory. AMD’s decision to release a 4GB version of the R9 390 seems like a wise move since it puts pressure on Nvidia in terms of price per performance.
Currently, the manufacturers that are releasing the updated R9 390 are Sapphire, XFX and PowerColor. The Sapphire Radeon R9 390 4G D5 Platinum Edition OC has a triple-slot Dual-X cooler which, according to Sapphire, allows for more flexible card adjustments. However, a report by VideoCarz mentioned that the Sapphire R9 390 4G is only overclocked by 10Mhz.
The XFX Radeon R9 930 4GB Double Dissipation (Black Wolf), on the other hand, comes with 1015MHz of clock speed which is 15MHz higher than the reference card specifications. XFX’s “Black Wolf” comes with a custom PCB which accommodates the Double Dissipation cooling solution by XFX. Meanwhile, PowerColor has come up with its own version of the newly updated R9 390 4GB. PowerColor’s 4GB R9 390 will be the first triple-fan version of the 4GB variant. This makes the cooling solution of the graphics card very efficient, to the point where the fans will only start spinning once the GPU hits 62-degree Celsius.
The fact that a 4GB variant of the Radeon R9 390 is released may indicate that AMD is putting pressure on Nvidia, especially since the 8GB R9 390 is usually compared against the GTX 970. Besides that, even though the rumoured GTX 960 Ti is due to come out soon, AMD might still have the advantage in terms of price point since the 4GB version of the R9 390 will definitely cost lower than its predecessor.
(Source: VideoCardz , Expreview)
