AMD Readies Radeon R9 390X to Take on GeForce GTX 980

AMD Readies Radeon R9 390X to Take on GeForce GTX 980 from TechpowerUp

It turns out that the big OEM design win liquid cooling solutions maker Asetek was bragging about, is the Radeon R9 390X, and the "disclosed OEM" AMD. Pictures of a cooler shroud is doing rounds on Chinese tech forums, which reveals something that's similar in design to the Radeon R9 295X2, only designed for single-GPU. The shroud has its fan intake pushed to where it normally is for single-GPU cards; with cutouts for the PCIe power connectors, and a central one, through with liquid cooling tubes pass through.

One can also take a peek at the base-plate of the cooler, which will cool the VRM and memory under the fan's air-flow. The cooler design reveals that AMD wants its reference-design cards to sound quieter "at any cost," even if it means liquid cooling solutions that can be messy with multi-card CrossFire setups, and in systems that already use liquid-cooling for the CPU; and leave it to AIB partners to come up with air-cooled cards, with meatier heatsinks. Other specs of the R9 390X are unknown, as is launch date. It could be based on a member of the "Pirate Islands" family of GPUs, of which the new "Tonga" GPU driving the R9 285 is a part of. A possible codename of AMD's big chip from this family is "Fiji."

And this is from VideoCardz:

Breaking news: AMD Radeon R9 390X cooling pictured

What you’re looking at is probably the first prototype of future Radeon R9 300 series cooling.

Just 3 weeks ago Asetek announced ‘the largest ever design win’.

Press Release:

Thursday, August 14, 2014 — Asetek® today announced that it has secured a design win with an undisclosed OEM customer for a graphics liquid cooling product. The ambitious project is forecasted by the customer to result in 2 – 4 million dollars of revenue. Shipping is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2015. The design win continues Asetek’s success in the growing graphics liquid cooling market.

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Radeon R9 390X has hybrid cooling

Well as it just turns out, that deal was with AMD to design new R9 300 series cooling solution. The new cooler is almost identical to R9 295X2 (which was design by Asetek by the way). The only difference is that the middle fan has been moved to the side, as only one GPU has to be cooled down. We can even see the place where liquid loop will be connected, so it’s quite obvious now that next Radeon flagship will use hybrid cooling system, just like dual-GPU Radeon R9 295X2 does.

Whether this is a good news or not, it’s a huge progress from plastic reference cooling of R9 200 series. We just hope the decision to use liquid cooling was not dictated by high temperate of the next high-end GPU, but rather a design upgrade.

In July this slide has been popular among tech sites. New GPU designed by Synapse most likely for AMD.

500 sq.mm silicon needs some proper cooling.

The rumors suggest we might be looking at Radeon R9 390X right now, equipped with Fiji GPU. This card is not expected to launch any time soon (like months soon).

A better aircooling would probably be cheaper than this...

True, still intrigued by the possibility of competition coming so soon. AMD is definitely doing a great job of remaining competitive on the GPU side of things.

Also, hopefully we'll see some capable and more cost effective air cooling solutions from AIB partners. I have to say that I at least like the aesthetic appeal of AMD's hybrid solutions so far though.

With the 980 not outperforming the 780Ti, they could get the upper hand again :D

Can GPU's get a diet soon? they are getting really thick.

Damn, this is great stuff from AMD! Too bad my 8350 will be nothing but a bottleneck for this card. It already struggles with my 290.

AMD: It probably won't cause a house fire.

LOL. I live in the Southwest so you can imagine how hot my PC can get during the summer if the A/C isn't on. It turns any room into a personal sauna ... oh well, cheaper than going to a bathhouse, eh? :D

@Kjranu: and who told you that 8350 bottleneck your 290 ? ????? 8350 will never bottleneck any gpu anytime soon ....

Well I can find a few games that FX8350 can bottleneck the performance of a GPU, especially a powerful GPU such as R9 290:

@Coseniath: this game is compiled for 1 or 2 cores ,,, and the strength for 8350 is multi core games ... like BF4 and others , yes 8350 single core is not that good but you can overcome it by overclocking it , anyhow its something you desire .

This? I posted 10....

You can overcome the single core performance by overcloking it to 7GHz? Cause you need that kind of speed in order to beat an i7 4790K single core performance. And maybe you might want to reach around 8GHz... (FX8350 4GHz single core: 1,13 Cinebench 11,5 score, i7 4790K 4GHz single core 1,92 Cinebench 11,5 score.) Back to reality most of FX8350 struggle to pass 4,7-4,8Ghz... And if they reach these speeds they need water cooling (like FX9590).

And in the end, I wonder why you insist to something that its creator (AMD) admitted that it was a failure and they needed a new architecture...

AMD has admitted that its Bulldozer microarchitecture was a misstep

@Coseniath: i know that intel is better i m just saying that most of these days we don't look out of the picture , there is a lot of points you can look at it , yes intel wins and everyone knows that but do you think that amd lacks the info or the energy , i m not defending amd , i could of buy an intel CPU , but no ; do you know that i can throw some money on a team and give him book of ELLI to reach every-way to make my hardware optimized , do you know that i can pay Microsoft to make your hardware suck , do you know that i can pay you so you can be useless, and be sure my friend you will be okay with it , its my 4th year my friend in the market and i work as mechatronics engineer and i know that everything have its advantage and dis , but just look PS3 did have the best CPU as they advertise did someone benefit from it ? and Xbox360 won , but now ps4 winning ? and i m sure that xbox will win after all of that .

My big pic is ; Hardware ,yes is a big factor , but just you know everything depend in software , and will always do .

Look to apple they are selling million of iphones and ppl are chasing their phone ,they are smarter than the whole android and opencrap community universe "i m Linux user btw " .

I m sorry if i talked a lot, this is my opinion , i m just sharing if you accept it or not , it's your way of living your life .

@Jawad2007: Well as for your first part about what AMD needs, the answer is... a really revolutionary chip like intel's Kentsfield that gave them more than 100% performance per core per GHz than previous gen.

Even with this Intel can easily catch up nowadays. The reason? Intel has become a giant compared to AMD. AMD has a value of around $6billion while Intel has a value of $130billion. Only in year 2011, Intel spend $8,4billion to R&D. This is almost 150% the entire value of AMD. Its like David against Goliath. If AMD would accept Nvidia's proposition to combine these companies in to one instead of buying the ATI then today Intel might had difficulties to be on top.

Now about software... I know that devs are slacking most of the times and they are not writing a game engine that can use more than 2 or 4 cores. But this is AMD's problem, not mine. I am just a consumer that I care to buy the best of both (3 if you go a long time back ;)), not to solve each company's problems. In anyway AMD admitted the failure when they already knew that the world was not ready for 8 cores.

PS3 had the best CPU? You mean the failure Cell architecture that IBM who design it, already abandon it?...

PS4 is now winning for the same reason XBOX360 won. Better GPU.

Both Hardware and software are filling each other. You cannot have Titan supercomputer and trying to play 1-core supported diablo 2, neither you can have an MMX 200Mhz and trying to play Crysis 3...

You need a balance for all things in order not to be either unable or overkill...

Now apple is a different story. If I took a $99 Moto E and place a bitten apple on it I bet that I can sell it for $500 and sold out all my stock in a couple of hours...

No you didn't talk a lot I really like people that they have their own opinion on certain subjects. If this wouldn't happen we would all be either zombies or sheeps (or isheeps)...

@Coseniath: I guess thanks , I guess I m crossing my fingers that mantle will work , there is a British say i remember from collage , " I m not rich , but I wont buy something cheap " . thanks for comments , I like ppl with good minds :) .

@Jawad2007: Thanks too and... sorry for being late, I was watching USA vs Serbia for the World Cup Final. xD

Anyway, it was nice talking with you :).

That is an odd place to place the power connectors, but I guess they are there so it doesn't tangle up with the tubing.

the 880gtx isnt even out yet is it? I don't care about a card thats two generations away, more interested in how the 880gtx will be running games.

Nvidia skipped the GTX8xx naming and went to GTX9xx and we might see reviews of GTX980 and GTX970, this week...

The 8xx naming convention was left to the Mobile GPUs only. This is why you will see 870M and such named mobile GPUs.

AMD doesn't understand the importance of power efficiency so im sure this will suck down power terribly like their cpus do, no listing of power usage here so im guessing it sucks bad.

After seeing the TDP power usage on nvidia cards the choice is clear. Nvidia all the way. But if anyone wants a loud, hot, power hungry card im sure AMD can hook them up. Look up the power usage of the last line of AM3 cpu cards AMD had come out, its a joke i couldn't believe how much more power they used over the intel cpus. unless you have free or very cheap electricity bills your insane to use amd.

It would be mighty impressive if these cards were loud and hot with liquid cooling.

8350 and have horrible slow single thread performance(equal with intel CPU's from 2006). And not many games use more than 4 threads, not to mention that it is not exactly an octa core.(only 4 FPU)

@MK-Professor: all the games works with 180 $ you can have almost the most fps , or less by 10 % max ... and I would like to add why did ps4 and X1 go with amd ? .

Cheaper SoC.

This is the first time in history of consoles that companies that sell them they are getting back their money from the 1st console they sell.

In previous gens, companies (like Sony) were loosing money for each console was sold and they expected to earn money by the selling rights.

@Coseniath: and you actually believe that Sony was losing for their hardware , btw maybe their benefit was not 200% , but 100% is not enough ...

At PS3 ,PS2 and PSX? Yes. And its not what you or I believe, its what happening....

@Coseniath: so you know someone there and he told you that ?

i wont believe media i can told you that i own a company and i m going to name it sonybox , and i could say it cost me 10000$ and i m selling for 100$ , i m so fail company ... i wont believe anything that i dont cee .

Well I can tell you also not to believe anything you can see cause the human eye cannot see a lot of things and not all the things we see they exist.

A great example are the stars in the sky. Some of them are already dead, yet you can see them and you see them alive...

This will not go to anywhere...

@Coseniath: are you actually comparing astronomy theories to marketing ... anyhow believe what you like its up to you .

Well I wasn't the one that minimized the truth universe in to what my eyes can see...

I told you facts that were posted by the companies and by the media that you might trust or not.

But instead of answering me with facts, you told me that the truth is what your eyes can see.

It turned like a conversation of 2 twelve years old kids...

Tell me how you would react if someone would answer you the same as you did to me...

@Coseniath: hahahah its np bro , choose what you like and i choose mine :) .