The Comparison between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and AMD Radeon R9 390

When it comes to high-performance graphics cards, two names that come to mind are NVIDIA's GeForce GTX series and AMD's Radeon series. In this article, we will be comparing two specific models: the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and the AMD Radeon R9 390. These cards are positioned in different price ranges, with the GTX 970 typically priced around $350-$400, while the R9 390 is generally available for between $300-$329.

Charts of Performance Comparison

Observe the charts provided, which show a clear picture of how these two graphics cards compare in terms of performance. The GTX 970 appears to be faster when overclocked, with one instance reaching an impressive 1250 MHz. However, it's essential to note that this card crashed during certain tests, while others passed successfully. The R9 390, on the other hand, achieved a stable 1200 MHz in several runs but may not reach such heights for every individual user.

Gaming Performance at 1440p

When it comes to gaming performance at 1440p resolutions, these two cards have different strengths and weaknesses. While they both offer decent performance, the GTX 970 seems to have an edge over the R9 390 in this area. However, it's crucial to consider that these cards may not be sufficient for 4K gaming on their own. Crossfire SLI configurations would be necessary to achieve better performance in this regard.

Crossfire SLI and 4K Gaming

For those considering 4K gaming, the situation becomes even more complicated. In this scenario, both the GTX 970 and R9 390 are insufficient on their own, but they can be paired with a second card via crossfire SLI to achieve better performance. However, at the current price point, it's unclear whether the benefits of using these cards in such configurations outweigh the costs.

Recommendation for Purchase

Based on our comparison, it appears that the AMD Radeon R9 390 offers superior value for its price compared to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. The R9 390 is priced lower than the GTX 970, yet still manages to deliver better performance and more future-proofing with its increased VRAM capacity.

Implications for Nvidia's Pricing Strategy

The release of this comparison card raises questions about Nvidia's pricing strategy. With the GTX 970 now being surpassed by the R9 390 in terms of raw performance and value, it seems that Nvidia may need to reevaluate their pricing approach. Historically, Nvidia has used the GTX 970 as a reference point for the $300-$350 price range. However, with the R9 390 offering similar performance at a lower price point, there is pressure on Nvidia to adjust their pricing accordingly.

The Future of Pricing and Performance

In conclusion, the comparison between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and AMD Radeon R9 390 highlights the importance of staying up-to-date with the latest graphics card releases. By evaluating these two cards side-by-side, we can better understand how they compare in terms of performance and value. This knowledge will be crucial for buyers who are looking to invest in a high-performance graphics card without breaking the bank.

Custom AMD Build and Future Plans

In addition to our comparison, we also have exciting plans to share with our audience. We're working on building an all-custom AMD system that features the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 as its graphics card. This build will include custom acrylic/pETG bent tubing, a unique case design, and a focus on showcasing the capabilities of this powerful GPU.

Follow Us on Social Media

If you enjoyed this comparison and would like to stay up-to-date with our latest content, be sure to follow us on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We also have a forum where you can engage with other enthusiasts and share your thoughts on the latest graphics card releases.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 and AMD Radeon R9 390 are two powerful graphics cards that offer distinct strengths and weaknesses in terms of performance and value. By comparing these two cards, we can gain a better understanding of how they measure up against each other. This comparison serves as an essential guide for anyone looking to invest in a high-performance graphics card without breaking the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and you guys have been giving me a lot of crap on social media saying I have been tweeting this video and teasing it for way too long while the time has finally come where we are going to take a look at AMD's new 300 series graphics cards starting with a 390 and I'm going to pin it up against the equally matched pricing of the GTX 970 and we are going to see who is king of the hill of the 330 dollar range graphics cards the built in resin water pump mounting locations improve the air flow and massive radiator support make the define s from fractal design the obvious choice for water cooling enthusiasts the S doesn't stand for sexy but it should ever since a 300 series was kind of leaked and just chatted about well before e3 there was a lot of the word rebranding thrown around and I was one of those ones that kind of thought to myself you know AMD rebranding the graphics card would be a terrible terrible thing and I think rebranding as a whole is something that people would definitely frown upon but you got to realize there is a difference between rebranding and refreshing now here's the way I kind of look at it a rebrand would be if we took one of these graphics cards off this shelf which was a previous generation changed absolutely nothing about it put a new label on it and then sold it as something else that would actually be a rebrand now I don't think refresh is necessarily a bad thing now a lot of companies actually refresh a lot of product lines because of advancements in manufacturing processes where they can do things more efficiently they can get better better power delivery lower Heat and they will package that as a new product even though the architecture remains mostly unchanged now this is something Intel even did with the Haswell and Devil's Canyon CPUs you've got the 4770k which everyone complained about it was a terrible overclocker and it got extremely hot because of a poor thermal interface material used under the heat spreader so people got very upset over the heat of the Intel CPUs specifically the 4770k so they did a minor refresh where they changed the power delivery to the CPU core to try and get the temperatures down as well as improving the manufacturing process of the way that the heat spreader is actually applied to the die so you get the 4790k now that's kind of what we have here where AMD has had several years now to kind of refine its manufacturing process and we've had about a year and a half about 20 months or so since the hawaii 290x launched and now we are sitting here looking at the 390 and 390 x now they are based on the same hawaii core that the 290 and to 90 x is based on but of course they have been able to improve the manufacturing process in my personal experience so far here i've spent a lot of time with this card already this isn't one of those reviews where i kind of do my beginning of the video and then I do the benchmarks and then I come back and tell you what I thought I've already fully benchmarked this card and I've done it now for two weeks straight and I've redone the tests and did them again and did them again with different drivers and so I've gotten very intimate I've gotten very intimate with this card already now I want to be the first to say that this is not a rebranded card like I said if they took the 290 exchanged nothing about it and slap the label on it to call it something new then it would be a rebrand this is a refresh they have gotten the temperatures down on the core giving you more overclocking Headroom I'm not sure how they did it but I was able to overclock this 390 farther than any 290 or 290 x-series card that I was able to get my hands on in the past it runs cooler and it has faster memory and eight gigs of it so they've changed a lot about it now I think a lot of people were hoping that the 300 series cards were going to have a new core but obviously the Tahiti core made its way into Fiji now whether or not Fiji cores are going to make their way down into the mainstream graphics cards I have no idea so let's go ahead and talk about MSI's offering here because one of the benefits of this card is the fact that pretty much every card on the market 393 90 X 380 they are all custom PCBs they are all board partner designs where they've taken the core and the architecture of the RAM and they have built it to specifications they feel meets their gaming needs now MSI obviously includes a very sexy back plate on the back of their gaming series that's always good to see it's ventilated so that you don't have a lot of heat saturation getting stuck under the heat spreader and it gives a heavy card like this more rigidity the heatsink on this thing is bigger than just about any heatsink I've ever seen which is good because the Hawaii core as we know is still notoriously hot but there are four massive heat pipes running the entire length of the card you can see they come all the way out here and massive massive massive aluminum heat sinks on here keeping everything nice and cool now one of the things I have always complained about and I've always used my Asus 290 X matrix Platinum Card as a prime example our companies that don't actively cool the VRMs well MSI is actively cooling the VRMs the heat plate on here directly contacts to vrm and goes into the main heatsink so your main heatsink is actively cooling the vrm not a dinky little billet strip of powder of heatsink that's just taped on and it's supposed to cool by downdraft I've already heated air nope it is taking the heat and it is going to transfer it to the heat pipes on this card on top of that you also have a heat spreader that runs the entire length of the card that's going to be giving some cooling to the RAM as well so MSI has really taken some of the cooling complaints that AMD fans have had about the 290 and to 90 X and have definitely integrated it into this card now on the back here it's got two DVI it's got your DisplayPort and an HDMI 1.4 on the back so it's going to give you good connectivity I like to see dual DVIs because a lot of people are still running panels that are 1080p 144 Hertz or less and they're going to be able to utilize DVI especially if you're going to be running multiple panels just like all of the other gaming series cards from MSI you have the white glowing logo on the top and then you've got two 100 millimeter fans keeping things nice and cool now unfortunately I've said this before this card is only going to appeal to two different people and that is going to be people who want a red themed build or people who just don't give a crap about the color so I don't think it's really hurt their sales though otherwise they would have probably changed the color already alright enough chatting about the card you guys want to see performance and let me tell you what numbers you're about to look at I did and this took a long time so feel free to hit that like button for the amount of hours it took to get these numbers I ran the 290x matrix platinum as kind of my baseline to compare it to previous generation one of the cards that was considered one of the best 290 X's amongst enthusiasts I tend to disagree but that's the card that I used I use my EVGA 970 SSC of the super super clock which is a custom PCB and the msi 398 gigabyte card here now I ran the matrix platinum at the max 1075 overclock that I was able to get out of it which is which was not great I ran this thing at stock speeds which was I believe 1050 and it's max overclock which was 1200 I've never received 1200 in any AMD card I've ever received so that was great and the SSC running at its factory clock of 1170 I believe was 1170 or 11 90 which is where the boost went to and then overclocked to 1440 - so you're going to see what five and different numbers on the charts you're going to see overclocked and stock speeds so you guys can complain that I do overclocked well I've went ahead and put both numbers in there so you guys can see how the performance also scaled so without further ado and enough chatting let's go ahead and take a look at those charts transition well there you go those are those numbers and like I said it took so many hours to do those benchmarks and then I did them three times each just to make sure I had good averages now if you look at those charts obviously you can see that these two cards were just leapfrogging stock for stock the 390 was faster overclocked the 970 it's faster but overclock the 390 and it's faster now I have no idea of knowing if all of the cards are going to reach 1200 in fact this thing was able to reach about 1250 but it crashed in a couple of tests and passed others so I pulled it all the way back to 1200 to be a number that I thought would be a good median who knows but even if it only overclocked to say 11 75 or something around there it's still going to beat the 970 and it still has a full usable eight gigabytes of vram on there for a good buffer when it comes to 1440p I still don't think this card or the 970 by themselves should ever be considered for 4k gaming these cards themselves are just not powerful enough you would have to crossfire SLI them but I'm telling you right now the amount of benefit you get for three hundred and twenty nine dollars a new egg right now the time of making this video three hundred and twenty nine bucks you can get this beast of a graphics card and get the kind of performance that you were seeing in the charts you know just a few minutes of just a minute ago I set it to a couple of the vendors that I currently work with that offer GTX graphics cards I said this card needs to give them concern for their 350 dollar 970 s because this is 20 dollars cheaper giving you more FPS a lot more vram and it's going to give you a lot more future compatibility with titles starting to use a lot more vram than they are core so I really personally at this point where we are today cannot offer or recommend a 970 of any variant over a 390 at the same price point actually with the 390 being a little bit cheaper don't know if I ever thought I would say that but this is good we need this type of performance comparisons and competition in the market because what's the logical answer to this going to be Nvidia it's got to drop the price of the 370 there's no way it makes sense the 970 used to kind of be the price point king for the three hundred and fifty dollars a three hundred twenty nine to three hundred and fifty dollar range they dropped the price of the 980 down to five hundred when the 980ti came out but they really really should have dropped the price of a nine seventy down to three hundred 299 or maybe 275 because honestly this is the way you need to go if that's your price point so there you go guys my review of the r9 390 here from MSI I can't say enough good about it that's why I was so excited in the fury video I know if you guys saw that I slipped some of these benchmark numbers in the fury video because I benchmarked this before I did the fury I just waited to see what was gonna happen with drivers on this and so the drivers obviously for the 300 series card are solid overclocking was great I don't know if everyone will be able to achieve 1200 I hope I actually achieved 1250 I backed it down to 1200 because I wanted to do a number that I thought more people will be able to achieve I didn't want to take what might have been a golden sample and flaunted and taunted out there but I pulled it back to 1200 and I know a lot of people achieve twelve hundred megahertz on their two hundred series cars or 290 and two ninety X's so this thing is a freaking monster well guys I hope you've enjoyed today's video thanks for watching if you're not subscribed feel free to hit the subscribe button stick around got a lot more stuff coming up on the channel here I've even got a custom AMD build that I'm doing it's going to have a gtx 980 graphics card in there but it is going to be an all custom acrylic /p etg bent tubing in there full custom you know case lapse case is going to be pretty badass one of the best AMD systems that's going to be built publicly on youtube why AMD well that's what the customer can afford but anyway we're going to go ahead and hop on out of here follow on social media twitter facebook all that sort of stuff if you guys have any questions there's always the forums JC sense calm now go ahead and stop peddling all my social media now and i'm gonna get the hell on out of here so feel free to watch another video or watch another youtube or you guys enjoy it me barnacle ease or - tech tips or something anyway let's drink in that community guys and as always see you the next onehey what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and you guys have been giving me a lot of crap on social media saying I have been tweeting this video and teasing it for way too long while the time has finally come where we are going to take a look at AMD's new 300 series graphics cards starting with a 390 and I'm going to pin it up against the equally matched pricing of the GTX 970 and we are going to see who is king of the hill of the 330 dollar range graphics cards the built in resin water pump mounting locations improve the air flow and massive radiator support make the define s from fractal design the obvious choice for water cooling enthusiasts the S doesn't stand for sexy but it should ever since a 300 series was kind of leaked and just chatted about well before e3 there was a lot of the word rebranding thrown around and I was one of those ones that kind of thought to myself you know AMD rebranding the graphics card would be a terrible terrible thing and I think rebranding as a whole is something that people would definitely frown upon but you got to realize there is a difference between rebranding and refreshing now here's the way I kind of look at it a rebrand would be if we took one of these graphics cards off this shelf which was a previous generation changed absolutely nothing about it put a new label on it and then sold it as something else that would actually be a rebrand now I don't think refresh is necessarily a bad thing now a lot of companies actually refresh a lot of product lines because of advancements in manufacturing processes where they can do things more efficiently they can get better better power delivery lower Heat and they will package that as a new product even though the architecture remains mostly unchanged now this is something Intel even did with the Haswell and Devil's Canyon CPUs you've got the 4770k which everyone complained about it was a terrible overclocker and it got extremely hot because of a poor thermal interface material used under the heat spreader so people got very upset over the heat of the Intel CPUs specifically the 4770k so they did a minor refresh where they changed the power delivery to the CPU core to try and get the temperatures down as well as improving the manufacturing process of the way that the heat spreader is actually applied to the die so you get the 4790k now that's kind of what we have here where AMD has had several years now to kind of refine its manufacturing process and we've had about a year and a half about 20 months or so since the hawaii 290x launched and now we are sitting here looking at the 390 and 390 x now they are based on the same hawaii core that the 290 and to 90 x is based on but of course they have been able to improve the manufacturing process in my personal experience so far here i've spent a lot of time with this card already this isn't one of those reviews where i kind of do my beginning of the video and then I do the benchmarks and then I come back and tell you what I thought I've already fully benchmarked this card and I've done it now for two weeks straight and I've redone the tests and did them again and did them again with different drivers and so I've gotten very intimate I've gotten very intimate with this card already now I want to be the first to say that this is not a rebranded card like I said if they took the 290 exchanged nothing about it and slap the label on it to call it something new then it would be a rebrand this is a refresh they have gotten the temperatures down on the core giving you more overclocking Headroom I'm not sure how they did it but I was able to overclock this 390 farther than any 290 or 290 x-series card that I was able to get my hands on in the past it runs cooler and it has faster memory and eight gigs of it so they've changed a lot about it now I think a lot of people were hoping that the 300 series cards were going to have a new core but obviously the Tahiti core made its way into Fiji now whether or not Fiji cores are going to make their way down into the mainstream graphics cards I have no idea so let's go ahead and talk about MSI's offering here because one of the benefits of this card is the fact that pretty much every card on the market 393 90 X 380 they are all custom PCBs they are all board partner designs where they've taken the core and the architecture of the RAM and they have built it to specifications they feel meets their gaming needs now MSI obviously includes a very sexy back plate on the back of their gaming series that's always good to see it's ventilated so that you don't have a lot of heat saturation getting stuck under the heat spreader and it gives a heavy card like this more rigidity the heatsink on this thing is bigger than just about any heatsink I've ever seen which is good because the Hawaii core as we know is still notoriously hot but there are four massive heat pipes running the entire length of the card you can see they come all the way out here and massive massive massive aluminum heat sinks on here keeping everything nice and cool now one of the things I have always complained about and I've always used my Asus 290 X matrix Platinum Card as a prime example our companies that don't actively cool the VRMs well MSI is actively cooling the VRMs the heat plate on here directly contacts to vrm and goes into the main heatsink so your main heatsink is actively cooling the vrm not a dinky little billet strip of powder of heatsink that's just taped on and it's supposed to cool by downdraft I've already heated air nope it is taking the heat and it is going to transfer it to the heat pipes on this card on top of that you also have a heat spreader that runs the entire length of the card that's going to be giving some cooling to the RAM as well so MSI has really taken some of the cooling complaints that AMD fans have had about the 290 and to 90 X and have definitely integrated it into this card now on the back here it's got two DVI it's got your DisplayPort and an HDMI 1.4 on the back so it's going to give you good connectivity I like to see dual DVIs because a lot of people are still running panels that are 1080p 144 Hertz or less and they're going to be able to utilize DVI especially if you're going to be running multiple panels just like all of the other gaming series cards from MSI you have the white glowing logo on the top and then you've got two 100 millimeter fans keeping things nice and cool now unfortunately I've said this before this card is only going to appeal to two different people and that is going to be people who want a red themed build or people who just don't give a crap about the color so I don't think it's really hurt their sales though otherwise they would have probably changed the color already alright enough chatting about the card you guys want to see performance and let me tell you what numbers you're about to look at I did and this took a long time so feel free to hit that like button for the amount of hours it took to get these numbers I ran the 290x matrix platinum as kind of my baseline to compare it to previous generation one of the cards that was considered one of the best 290 X's amongst enthusiasts I tend to disagree but that's the card that I used I use my EVGA 970 SSC of the super super clock which is a custom PCB and the msi 398 gigabyte card here now I ran the matrix platinum at the max 1075 overclock that I was able to get out of it which is which was not great I ran this thing at stock speeds which was I believe 1050 and it's max overclock which was 1200 I've never received 1200 in any AMD card I've ever received so that was great and the SSC running at its factory clock of 1170 I believe was 1170 or 11 90 which is where the boost went to and then overclocked to 1440 - so you're going to see what five and different numbers on the charts you're going to see overclocked and stock speeds so you guys can complain that I do overclocked well I've went ahead and put both numbers in there so you guys can see how the performance also scaled so without further ado and enough chatting let's go ahead and take a look at those charts transition well there you go those are those numbers and like I said it took so many hours to do those benchmarks and then I did them three times each just to make sure I had good averages now if you look at those charts obviously you can see that these two cards were just leapfrogging stock for stock the 390 was faster overclocked the 970 it's faster but overclock the 390 and it's faster now I have no idea of knowing if all of the cards are going to reach 1200 in fact this thing was able to reach about 1250 but it crashed in a couple of tests and passed others so I pulled it all the way back to 1200 to be a number that I thought would be a good median who knows but even if it only overclocked to say 11 75 or something around there it's still going to beat the 970 and it still has a full usable eight gigabytes of vram on there for a good buffer when it comes to 1440p I still don't think this card or the 970 by themselves should ever be considered for 4k gaming these cards themselves are just not powerful enough you would have to crossfire SLI them but I'm telling you right now the amount of benefit you get for three hundred and twenty nine dollars a new egg right now the time of making this video three hundred and twenty nine bucks you can get this beast of a graphics card and get the kind of performance that you were seeing in the charts you know just a few minutes of just a minute ago I set it to a couple of the vendors that I currently work with that offer GTX graphics cards I said this card needs to give them concern for their 350 dollar 970 s because this is 20 dollars cheaper giving you more FPS a lot more vram and it's going to give you a lot more future compatibility with titles starting to use a lot more vram than they are core so I really personally at this point where we are today cannot offer or recommend a 970 of any variant over a 390 at the same price point actually with the 390 being a little bit cheaper don't know if I ever thought I would say that but this is good we need this type of performance comparisons and competition in the market because what's the logical answer to this going to be Nvidia it's got to drop the price of the 370 there's no way it makes sense the 970 used to kind of be the price point king for the three hundred and fifty dollars a three hundred twenty nine to three hundred and fifty dollar range they dropped the price of the 980 down to five hundred when the 980ti came out but they really really should have dropped the price of a nine seventy down to three hundred 299 or maybe 275 because honestly this is the way you need to go if that's your price point so there you go guys my review of the r9 390 here from MSI I can't say enough good about it that's why I was so excited in the fury video I know if you guys saw that I slipped some of these benchmark numbers in the fury video because I benchmarked this before I did the fury I just waited to see what was gonna happen with drivers on this and so the drivers obviously for the 300 series card are solid overclocking was great I don't know if everyone will be able to achieve 1200 I hope I actually achieved 1250 I backed it down to 1200 because I wanted to do a number that I thought more people will be able to achieve I didn't want to take what might have been a golden sample and flaunted and taunted out there but I pulled it back to 1200 and I know a lot of people achieve twelve hundred megahertz on their two hundred series cars or 290 and two ninety X's so this thing is a freaking monster well guys I hope you've enjoyed today's video thanks for watching if you're not subscribed feel free to hit the subscribe button stick around got a lot more stuff coming up on the channel here I've even got a custom AMD build that I'm doing it's going to have a gtx 980 graphics card in there but it is going to be an all custom acrylic /p etg bent tubing in there full custom you know case lapse case is going to be pretty badass one of the best AMD systems that's going to be built publicly on youtube why AMD well that's what the customer can afford but anyway we're going to go ahead and hop on out of here follow on social media twitter facebook all that sort of stuff if you guys have any questions there's always the forums JC sense calm now go ahead and stop peddling all my social media now and i'm gonna get the hell on out of here so feel free to watch another video or watch another youtube or you guys enjoy it me barnacle ease or - tech tips or something anyway let's drink in that community guys and as always see you the next one\n"