Sapphire Nitro R9 390 8G DS Review, Playing With Nitro

Sapphires Spin On The Nitro R9 390’s Technology

Dual BIOS

“This product supports both Legacy and UEFI BIOS. By factory default, the card itself is under Legacy mode. By pressing the button with SAPPHIRE logo, UEFI mode will be easily enabled.

• Secure boot

  Sapphire product with “Dual Firmware Support” function equips the UEFI firmware that is digitally signed and approved by Microsoft for Secure Boot. With Windows8’s secured boot architecture and its establishment of a root of trust, the customer is protected from malicious code executing in the boot path by ensuring that only signed, certified “known good” code and boot loaders can execute before the opening system itself loads.

• Faster boot and resume times

  When compare to the legacy BIOS, system with UEFI has a much faster boot and resume time to the OS.”

Black Diamond Choke

“Choke is an important component of the graphics card. By working with the component engineer, Sapphire’s black diamond choke is 10% cooler and offers 25% more power efficiency than a normal choke. The graphics card will be more reliable and save energy.”

16K Hours Capacitor

“High quality aluminum-made long life capacitor lengthens the life time of the product. Improved reliability and better overclocking are possible by using only high-polymer, aluminum capacitors which possess far superior characteristics than regular aluminum capacitor for a longer product life. When operational temperatures drop by 20°C, the product life span is extended by a factor of ten, when the operational temperature increases by 20°C, the product life span only decreases by 10%.”

Two-ball bearing

10mm heat pipe

“10mm diameter copper heat pipe has 53% better efficiency at dissipating heat than 8mm heat-pipe. Single 10Ø heat pipe is capable to handle 90W thermal dissipating. (8Ø is designed for TDP 65W). With 1x 10mm, 2 x 8mm and 2x 6mm heat pipe, the module is designed to handle over 300W GPU Power.”

Intelligent Fan Control II

“Intelligent fan control allows one or more fans to be stopped for lower noise when the card is under light load and automatically restarted when the card temperature rises”

Introducing AMD’s Liquid VR

“LiquidVR™ is an AMD initiative dedicated to making VR as comfortable and realistic as possible by creating and maintaining what’s known as “presence” — a state of immersive awareness where situations, objects, or characters within the virtual world seem “real.”  Guided by close collaboration with key technology partners in the ecosystem, LiquidVR™ uses AMD’s GPU software and hardware sub-systems to tackle the common issues and pitfalls of achieving presence, such as reducing motion-to-photon latency to less than 10 milliseconds. This is a crucial step in addressing the common discomforts, such as motion sickness, that may occur when you turn your head in a virtual world and it takes even a few milliseconds too long for a new perspective to be shown.”

 

AMD Freesync Technology

“No stuttering. No tearing. Just gaming.”

AMD FreeSync™ technology allows a compatible graphics card and monitor to dynamically change frame rates for the optimum display quality without tearing.

Industry-Standard Displayport

Freesync uses industry-standard displayport Adaptive-Sync Eliminates screen tearing without all the usual lag and latency

• Synchronizes the refresh rate of a compatible monitor to the frame rate of your content, however much it varies
• Monitor partners are validating with drivers from AMD now

 

DirectX 12

“DirectX® 12 is a new, “console-like” graphics API from Microsoft® that empowers game developers with more direct and obvious control of PC hardware. This direct or “explicit” control better exposes the hardware resources of AMD Radeon™ GPUs to yield higher hardware throughput and, ultimately, more performance for users. To put it simply: much more efficient hardware through smarter software! At the discretion of a game developer, this superior efficiency can be spent on higher framerates, lower latency (VR), lower power consumption, better image quality, or some calculated balance of all four. In any scenario, gamers stand to benefit greatly from choosing AMD hardware to run their favorite DirectX® 12 game.”

AMD Eyefinity Technology

Multidisplay technology for gaming, productivity and entertainment

“We are taking you beyond the boundaries of traditional PC displays. AMD Eyefinity technology expands the traditional limits of desktop computing by multiplying your screen area. With multiple monitors, games become more immersive, workstations become more useful and you become more productive (an average of 42% more productive according to one study).

Take your PC games to the next level of reality and immersion. Most modern games look great on three screens, and only AMD Radeon™ graphics offer you the ability to play across five screens for an eye-popping gaming experience. Other combinations and configurations with up to six screens work too.1 Create your dream display.”

AMD Crossfire™

Harness the power of multiple GPUs

AMD CrossFire™ technology is the ultimate multi-GPU performance gaming platform. Unlocking game-dominating power, AMD CrossFire™ harnesses the power of two or more discrete graphics cards working in parallel to dramatically improve gaming performance.1 AMD CrossFire™ technology ready graphics cards fit practically every budget. With the flexibility to combine two, three or four GPUs, AMD CrossFire™ technology is the perfect solution for those who demand extreme performance.

Enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3)

“Watch the hottest Blu-ray movies or other HD content at full 1080p (and beyond !) display resolution. Enjoy a feature rich video experience with enhanced Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD 3), offloading the bulk of the video decoding tasks from the CPU to the GPU allowing for a cooler, quieter and more balanced system.”