After an extremely disappointing experience with a GTX970, I may be tempted to convert to Amd! If I can bring myself to!

Seven comments and no-one's said to wait for all the new cards from June? :confused:

Hot if for some reason you need to buy today, but it's a terrible, terrible time to buy. Wait!

£3.49 delivery :smiley:

Expect these to keep dropping in price, still a good price in the here and now.

I'd take the leap at £200, il wait and see what the new architecture offers first il stick with my 280x till then.

After an extremely disappointing experience with a GTX970, I may be tempted to convert to Amd! If I can bring myself to!

Seven comments and no-one's said to wait for all the new cards from June? :confused:

Hot if for some reason you need to buy today, but it's a terrible, terrible time to buy. Wait!

Probably the best 390 you can buy - I've got one. However, be warned. It's HUGE. And heavy. It's factory overclocked and there's a bit more overclocking headroom on it, but put it on a watt meter and you'll see an enormous leap in power consumption and heat production.

Good point. Assuming Nvidia does launch 1070/1080 in July, we can expect prices on 970/980 and 390/390X to drop like a stone. Maybe even 980 Ti too, depending on how powerful the new architecture is.

Yeah if the next gen weren't round the corner I'd be sorely tempted (heck I am, but I'm resisting)

Maybe a 490 or a 1070 and treat myself to new mobo/CPU too later in the year - fingers crossed AMD zen lives up to the hype...

Not sure about that, isn't this the hottest running 390 ?

​I don't believe the price drops on new cards. nvidia stopped production of the gtx 970 and so they will be harder to find. it's not unheard of for the price to go up. the price of second hand cars drop like a sac of crap but not brand new cards.

​cards not cars stupid phone

I'm looking into 4k gaming options and so far the 980 TI seems the best power/pound, with a view that I'll add a second when they get cheaper to achieve maybe 50-60 FPS at 4K.

Any idea how two of these in crossfire would perform? I couldda that now and not wait!

Rgds
Matt

Given the power consumption of these little babies on overclock, this is literally a very hot deal :smiley:

HD7970 new architecture in 2012 they call GCN 1.0 Next Year 2013 they release R9 280X basically it is HD7970 GCN 1.0 but they have Radeon R9 290X which is improved GCN 1.1 Whats new in GCN 1.1 - DX12 more compute power etc nothing new in real ..
2014 Radeon R9 390X and Radeon R9 390 is GCN 1.1

So if you buy R9 390 it is 2012-2013 architecture with 8 GB of memory Does it bad 2013 not really as PS4 and xbox HD7000 series GPU + architecture but they tweaked GPU

I will be wait for new Nvidia GPU release is it will be soon and GTX 980 Ti will drop the price plus all other radeons

If you do not have PS4 or xbox just get and enjoy gaming for another 5 Years and do not bother about GPU frame rates etc ..... will save you money and time

MSI is the best one, followed by Sapphire. Asus is supposed to be the worst of the bunch on the 390.

hi, I have a HP Pavilion 550-111na Desktop PC it has a R7 installed from new can i upgrade to this R9, If so what else do i need to know or do. Not very good with the tech bits so go easy. Thanks

According to the 550-111na details (http://support.hp.com/th-en/document/c04804119) it only has a 180W power supply, under load this card can use ~400W. Unless you also replace the power supply it definitely won't work (and even then, I'm not sure - didn't look into it past the PSU).

​You need to check if your Power Supply is atleast 650w. Also they might not have included the amount pci-e cables this card needs to be powered. And you'd have to check if there's enough room in your case to accommodate this GPU, which I don't reckon there will be after seeing pics of it. Also, that case seems horrible for any kind of airflow, the card may choke.

TL:DR no there's a high chance you can't upgrade mate :disappointed:

Agreed! They're milking it a fair bit now since the R9 290X was going for a fair bit less than this on its way out. Still happy with my 290X VaporX for £227! :laughing:

Anyone have any ideas or thoughts on how much the price of these cards will drop to/by?

Read a few threads now and someone does mention waiting. I held off buying the recent ebuyer deals with the free ssd. In the hope that the drops will be like the ps3 when the ps4 came out!

Thanks for your valued comment. cheers.

Thanks for your comment,Cheers

Probably 3.5GB :wink:

Got A 980 myself. I think I'm going to switch to AMD next gen. I can't take any more of this planned obsolescence bullsh*t anymore.

Is it for a upgrade from a 280x

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Avoid crossfire or SLI, not a great experience

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Yes, big jump

I got sent one of these for as a warranty replacement for an asus 290x. I was relieved to find that it does actually fits inside a fractal node 304! (just in case anybody was wondering. silent fans on low load are great for media and general office use.

It's hard to tell really, I would expect around the £220 mark but thats just my opinion, the old 290 got to about £170 ish if I recall correctly.
I've read somewhere that Nvidia has stopped producing 970 and above chips so you might see some deals on those then they just disappear. New cards are due to be announced around June I believe so if you can it may be worth waiting to see.
People seem to be expecting prices to drop like a stone but I can't see it happening, they'll probably drop a bit then just disappear.

Really better off waiting for the new cards, they're cheaper to make as well so they should also be good prices.

Since when have production costs correlated with off the shelf price?

We saw the 780 hitting £180 multiple times at the start of last year, dropping as low as £165. We saw the 290X scrape below £200, and the 290 in the £170-190 range really quite frequently.

The 770, which the 970 replaced, was £110-140 many times during the first quarter of 2015 - formerly a £230 card, just like the 970.

Do you have some specific reasoning behind your guess that it will be different this time?

does this have hdmi 2.0? i want 60hz on a 4k tv

As this is a triple fan, how does this compare to the sapphire tri model? i hear that sapphire are the leading manufacturer for AMD cards... I wouldn't mind paying that small bit more for a more premium card

Can you elaborate on this a bit please? I was planning to double up my 970 when the prices drop, why is it not a great experience.

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Because it's not as simple as double the performance. Some games do not even see any difference at all. Nvidia and AMD are very lacking in dual card support in games

just answering my own question 390 does not have hdmi 2.0, i would have to use displayport and add an adaptor (£35)

I guess it depends on the game, benchmarks here show better than double from a single 970 to an SLI pair.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2015-vga-charts/12-Tomb-Raider-1080p,3675.html
But it seems not uncommon for there to be no SLI support at launch.

Will keep an open mind at upgrade time in that case, cheers.

I'm speaking from old experience here, when I crossfired my 5850's in 2010. I was extremely excited as I managed to get a second 5850 fairly cheap shortly after their release... and imagined a world of hypnotic, unparalleled speed.. :smiley:

I suspect things have improved a little more now, but my experience was this:

• Frames per second improvements where seen in most games, especially BF3
• The driver I used made a big difference. I ended up using an older driver which ensured my BF3 experience was getting optimal frame rates (the second card improved the frame rates by over two thirds).
• Although all the games I tried saw an improvement, not all were that big
• From time to time the second graphics card wasn't recognised by my system despite trying numerous things (reinstalled Windows 7, reapplied the driver, re-seated the cards, etc..)

Eventually, I had to conceded to myself that I only bought the second card for novelty reasons more than actually needing it.... and in truth I saw very little difference as it was the FPS counter telling me there was a difference rather than me actually seeing it.

Anyway, not sure that has helped at all.. but thought I would share this lil chestnut anyway :smiley:

Looking at the 4K tests as I am, then indeed it seems SLI/Crossfire is sometimes the only way to achieve over 30 FPS.

Indeed, even a 980 Titan/6700k combo seems to struggle with 4K, but SLI 380 TI's get close to. 60-70 fps.

Matt

Given the perfect scenario, scaling, support, it should run great. It's usually far from though.

It's been said in just about every graphics card thread for the past three months.

Smoking , well it will be if you had it in closed case like i did.95* in game wasnt fun , now with a vented case it sits around 72* with 42% fan duty.

Also i run it with a 550w psu just fine .It is a gold psu however

My bad, been busy. Apprently the next Polaris card in this price range will be around the same performance as a 980 ti and a lower TDP

That sounds highly unlikely but who knows :smile:

really want this, big step up from 1gb 6870. Still have a 2500k though. Should I upgrade my CPU and motherboard too?

Definitely not the best you can buy. MSI or Sapphire are renowned for being the best 390 cards. These Asus cards are known for overheating due to poor fans compared to others.

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No need to upgrade the rest

No specific reasoning, but the exchange rate is pretty poor at the moment with the whole brexit question, which may have an impact and the fact that the cards 300 series especially aren't that old, well the badges anyway.
I'm quite happy to be proven wrong but I can't see those sort of drops this time, as I said I read somewhere Nvidia has stopped producing 970 and above so we may see prices hold then the cards disappear

​dont buy crappy branded PCs mate, next time build a custom one yourself or get one built by someone like ovetclockers

Good price on the card! Those worried about power consumption, I can confirm that a 500watt PSU might be enough.

I have a 6600k o/c'd to 3.4, 16gb ram, 2x2tb, SSD with the Sapphire Nitro R9 390 (which is known to use more power than most) and with the help of a plug power reader at most, my computer was consuming around 320-330watt, on odd occasion nearer 350 but that is once every blue moon. I checked whilst running Black Ops 3 and GTA5.

​It wasn't the 3.5gb vram issue.

It's the fact that there seems to be an alarming number of cases of the 970 losing output signal and crashing the system. It's either an inherent fault within the cards determined by the 'silicon lottery' or there's an unstated compatibility issue out there.

If you Google 'GTX970 black screen' there are literally hundreds of threads on various forums out there with exactly the same problem, seemingly with no solution.

The bit that **** me off the most though is that there's NO official response from Nvidia on this, even though the geforce forums have the largest concentration of people reporting the issue. They just don't seem to care!

It's such a shame because when the 970 works, it's absolutely phenomenal!!

Thanks for your comment, I get what you mean. I payed £299.99 Xmas just gone. That,s all the funds i had. Cheers.