Radeon R9 390

The Radeon R9 390 is a high-end card from AMD's 2015 GCN 3 generation, built on the Hawaii Pro die and effectively a refined, higher-clocked successor to the R9 290. It competes directly with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 at its price point.

Its most distinctive feature is its 8GB GDDR5 frame buffer on a wide 512-bit memory bus — a highly generous allocation for its era and well ahead of most competing cards at the time. The TDP sits around 275W, requiring two 8-pin power connectors. GCN 3 supports DirectX 12 and AMD FreeSync, but the architecture predates hardware ray tracing and dedicated AI acceleration.

With 8GB of VRAM and strong rasterization throughput, the R9 390 handles 1080p and 1440p gaming comfortably and holds up well for texture-heavy workloads. It remains relevant for users who need reliable memory headroom for older games or GPU compute tasks at minimal cost.