By now we know all about the new refresh of the R9 2xx lineup that AMD recently released with faster renamed cores, faster GDDR5-memory as well as mature silicone. This has presented OEM’s with the opportunity to tune up the cores and Sapphire has taken the initiative to launch a new twist on their GPU’s; the Nitro Series. Nitro is focused on high performance at a good value which in our minds is a winning strategy. Pop a high quality card like the Sapphire Nitro R9 390 out there with 6.2 Billion transistors and 2816 Stream processors at a value price and people will gravitate to it. Sapphire, of course, has a new logo for the Nitro series. The Specifications table makes it clear that the Sapphire Nitro R9 390 has the same basic design as the TRI-X R9 290 Sapphire released early on in 2014. The Sapphire Nitro R9 390 get a few tweaks and the core is pushed up to 1010MHz. The card also gets an additional 4GB of memory that runs 250MHz (real) or 1000MHz effective faster. As we all know raising the core speed and memory speed requires more power so the TDP on the Sapphire Nitro R9 390 jumped up 375W from the reference R9 290 which hit the wall socket for 275 – 300W at full load.



Link: Bjorn3D