Hardware Asus Radeon R9 390 Strix OC Review

My reference 290X (watercooled) just scored 4209 in Valley Benchmark. There doesn't seem to be much point downgrading to a 390X that scores 4171.

 

"Asus invests significantly more attention into the details and quality of components used than other vendors in the same price bracket."

But didn't we also just say that they're adding a premium and thus pricing themselves higher than others?

 

You are aware that the score is tied to CPU speed too, right?

The 290X is the same as a 390X, identical in fact. The only thing that has changed besides clock speeds (if any) is the VRAM which doubled to 8GB.

 

Terms like this are a little ambiguous in my mind. I understand it as 'price bracket' = £250-£300 for example, which would cover the vast majority of options from most vendors for a specific GPU. While 'price point' = £300 (give or take £5 either way) which would mean that the example GPU would be significantly higher than a £250 'price point' option while still being within the same 'price bracket'.

In the real world I would say that ASUS usually has a higher price point than MSI for a like GPU while they both still hit the same price bracket. Thus, more people are choosing MSI rather than ASUS these days.

The fact that ASUS may be being more selective with regards to their component choices can also be seen as a reason or justification for their higher prices.

 

So, um, what about the competing parts from Nvidia? (GTX 970 competes in the same space, no?) Doesn't a comparison have more value if you're comparing other products that compete with the one being showcased?

 

Unless I am incorrect, the reason for that omission is that the 970 was reviewed with the old gaming rigs and so the scores would be misleading but that they should be included when (if) they get time to retest a 970 with the new rig.

(EDIT) Yep, I was correct. Below are two quotes from Dogbert666 on the MSI 980 Ti article.

From what I can tell from the older scores, the 970 and the 390 would pretty much trade blows and any performance gains from either would be pretty negligible although the 970 draws less power. Price wise it depends on the manufacturer as on SCAN, the ASUS 970 is cheaper than the 390, while the MSI 390 is cheaper than the 970.

 

in other words, a retest of the 970 is dearly needed for reference.

 

yes and so above you can read:

"I am working on getting the 970 in the graphs when possible."