We review the ASUS Radeon R9 390X STRIX. The card's equipped with that renamed Hawaii GPU, now called Grenada. Thanks to a huge triple slot air cooler based on the new DirectCU III design the product is purring at just roughly 83 Degrees C, that's under full gaming load whilst being factory clocked at 1070 MHz on the GPU base clock. The 2816 Stream processor based Hawaii/Grenada chip will get paired with 8 GB GDDR5 memory running along a 512-bit memory interface. The card itself is fully customized including component selection, custom PCB, custom cooling, well... custom everything! Powered through 8-Pin + 6-Pin power configuration it obviously runs at factory overclocked specifications as well.

So to clear up some confusion from the get-go, this product is based on the Hawaii GPU released back in October 2013, the silicon is the same yet with a few tweaks applied the product is now called Grenada, the latest iteration of the asic. It is the very same 6 Billion transistor GPU on that 28nm fab based 438 mm2 Die. Over time the fabrication will however yield better; much like fine wine the latest iterations of the silicon evolve, hence they can now be clocked a notch faster. The memory is tied to a 512-bit memory bus with one distinct difference, you now get 8 GB of graphics memory. That memory is tweaked and clocked a notch faster as well, 6 GHz (effective data-rate) for the reference products, with the MSI model tested today running 6.1 Gbps (GDDR5) memory. The 390X GPU will get a reference clock of 1050 MHz, this MSI SKU is factory clocked at 1100 MHz. So, overall coming from the 290X you should see performance increases running up-to maybe 10% overall, depending on the card you purchase. With the recent focus on Ultra HD gaming, AMD is also marketing that to be pretty significant, hence that 8 GB of graphics memory. It's not new though as there have already been 8 GB SKUs of the 290X available for over a year, let's do mention that as well.