Since the latest display driver (Catalyst 15.7) finally brought support for both Radeon 200 series and 300 series in one installation, I decided to test if CrossFire between 390X and 290X is possible. Well it is.
The connection between Grenada and Hawaii was not trouble-free. First of all, both cards ship with different clocks. We can easily tell Afterburner to synchronize the clocks between cards, but things like power limit and core overvoltage would almost never save. That said, both cards had to be configured separately.
I decided to setup both cards to run at stock R9 390X clocks (1050/1500 MHz), because I knew these settings are stable with my 290X sample. In other words, this should translate into R9 390X CrossFire test. The only difference is that R9 390X has 8GB and R9 290X has 4GB frame buffer, so after CrossFiring these cards we end up with 4GB.
In case you wonder how it looks in 3DMark:
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire 3DMark Fire Strike Performance
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire 3DMark Fire Strike
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire Unigine Valley
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire Hitman Absolution
R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire Tomb Raider
R9 390X/R9 290X CrossFire scaling:
- FireStrike Ultra — 180%
- Fire Strike Extreme — 187%
- Fire Strike Performance — 190%
- Unigine Valley 1080p — 150%
- Unigine Valley 1440p — 179%
- Tomb Raider 1440p — 185%
- Hitman Absolution 1440p — 144%
Hawaii/Grenada CrossFire seems to be a very interesting solution for current 290X owners. It’s true, you are wasting 4GB of GDDR5 memory with 390X, but overall performance is very good. It should be even more interesting for those who own 290X 8GB cards, as modders succesfully flashed 390X BIOS into 290X cards. Actually I managed to flash two 390X bioses into 290X, it worked, but it was not stable. Besides, 390X/390X CrossFire works, so you can stick to Afterburner overclocking if you need both cards to operate at the same frequencies.
| Review Contents | |
|---|---|
| Page 1 | Introduction |
| Page 2 | Overview HIS Radeon R9 390X IceQX² OC |
| Page 3 | Overview MSI GeForce GTX 980 GAMING 4G |
| Page 4 | Testing platform and methodology |
| Page 5 | Test Overclocking |
| Page 6 | Test Power consumption ● Temperature ● Memory Utilization |
| Page 7 | Test 3DMark11 ● 3DMark ● Catzilla ● Unigine Valley ● CompuBench |
| Page 8 | Test Batman: AO ● COH2 ● GRID: A. ● Hitman A. ● Metro: LL ● THIEF ● Tomb Raider ● SoM ● SE3 |
| Page 9 | Bonus Content Radeon R9 390X & R9 290X CrossFire mini-test |
| Page 10 | Conclusion |