At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R9 390X IceQ X2 OC 8GB Video Card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About HIS:

 

“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.

HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.

In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.

Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”

Product Features:

 

The HIS R9 390X IceQ X2 OC video card is incorporating an efficient cooling system with two fans for minimizing the temperatures as much as possible while keeping the noise levels low; the included fans are extremely durable with a life span estimated of up to 50000 hours.

 

The card comes with a HIS Special Metal Rib for reinforcing the card; after it we will get to see the multi-heatpipe heatsink with the two fans and lastly we get to see the metallic shroud which acts as an anti-dust cover.

 

The frontal plate is accompanied with the back aluminum plate so the PCB does not change its shape because of the rather heavy cooling system.

 

The card is equipped with a revised power design which improves overclocking capabilities and HIS is utilizing Dynamic Phase Control PWM IC for saving power.

 

As we have seen with the 290/290X video cards, the 390X is equipped with two separate BIOSes; one is the Standard version and the other is the Silent BIOS which is recommended to be used when not gaming.

 

CrossFireX Ready!

The card is armed with 2x Crossfire Connectors and is ready for up to 4-way crossfire for strengthened performance!

 

AMD FreeSync™ Technology

The FreeSync™ technology resolves the communication issues between processor and monitor, eliminating image tears and choppiness for effortlessly smooth gameplay.

 

GCN

With AMD 2nd generation GCN technology, the card optimizes DirectX® 12 gaming performance automatically up to 2.5 times faster! It also offers up to 4.5x compute performance and up to 95% lower GPU Idle Power Consumption!

 

AMD TrueAudio

With the sonic brilliance of AMD TrueAudio technology, your games now sound as good as they look. You get the most revolutionary, realistic and breathtaking sound we’ve ever put in a GPU.

 

AMD Eyefinity

Set up Eyefinity on 3 displays with No ACTIVE DisplayPort Adapter is needed.

 

Enjoy HD Beauty

With Full HD 1080p support, the card delivers high quality 1920X1080 graphics, enabling seamless full-screen video playback. See HD, hear HD and feel HD - Enjoy the beautiful graphics now with the card!

 

Enjoy Copy Protected Movies

The card is HDCP complaint, enabling users to play copy-protected content, such as commercial DVD movies.

 

Enjoy True to Life Graphics

ULTRA HD videos have resolution four times that of current HD videos, meaning images too clear that may deceive your eyes! With the card, you are set for getting the movie theater experience to your home. You may be able to watch a video shooting the Eiffel tower and zoom it in to see your friend’s face clearly from the top! Get your eyes impressed and enjoy mind-blowing graphics with extreme clarity, depth and texture!

 

PCI-e 3.0 Support

Armed with the latest PCI-e 3.0 bus design maximizes performance by delivering double bandwidth per lane of PCI-e 2.x. Paired the card with the latest platforms and get the ultimate performance!

 

More Graphics, Less Power!

The new architecture of the card gets more usable processing power for your money, enabling better frame rates in the latest games at high resolutions. In addition, with AMD ZeroCore Power & AMD PowerTune technologies, you can optimize the balance between performance and power consumption of your system by adjusting the engine clock during runtime of the card. Manage the power and keep your wallet loaded!

 

See More, Enjoy More!

The card supports 30” LCD monitor and any large size TV up to 80" feature with 16:9 ratio in amazing 4096 by 2160 resolution. Up-scaling your computer into a multimedia center with the biggest display!

 

View More, Work Better

Having one dedicated screen just for twitter or Facebook and a second for outlook is not a dream anymore. The card features a DisplayPort for enhanced workspace flexibility. You can easily connect to the 27” Apple LED Cinema Displays with the DisplayPort. The dual-link DVI port allows you connect to a 30” DVI display up to 2560x1600. Resolution can even reach 4096x2160 with HDMI® , good for TV up to 80"!

 

Hear Better in Video Conference

Most GPUs today support only one audio stream at a time. The card, however, has Discrete Digital Multi-Point Audio that can simultaneously output multiple, independent audio streams. Audio seamlessly follows the video, providing affordable multi-display, multi-audio conferencing for consumers!

 

 

Product Specifications:

 

 

After reviewing the entire AMD 200 series last year, we are coming back to you guys with the fresh 300-series cards which were recently released by AMD. We will first begin with the 390X video card which sports twice as much VRAM as we have seen with the 290X and sports higher clocks, being based on the same architecture. In order to clean up the confusion, the product is based on the Hawaii GPU which was released back in October 2013 (GPU-Z also confirms this when having the card installed), but the revised version is now called Grenada and features some minor improvements. As expected, over time the yields became better and better and even if we are dealing with the same 28nm 438mm2 die, we will have better overclocking capabilities. We would like to say that this compares with the Haswell to Devils Canyon Intel CPUs which are basically the same but thanks to the improved manufacturing process, the overclocks got better and better.

 

As we have seen before, the memory is tied to a 512-bit bus, works now at 6GHz (effective data-rate) instead of 5GHz as we have seen with the R9 290X and while the AMD Radeon R9 390X OEM design was designed to run at 1050MHz, the HIS variant is overclocked even further at 1070MHz, hence the OC name.

 

Despite the fact that the card runs games at 4K while sporting a decent frame rate, HDMI is still 1.4a so if we use a TV we will only get 30FPS at this resolution, making the mouse cursor on the desktop sluggish.

 

Enough technical blabber! Let’s get the card in focus and see what we’ve got; right from the start, we will see that HIS is intending on convincing the user that the card will offer very good temperatures with their cooling system by displaying a suggestive box art:

 

 

 

Some of the supported technologies and card features are displayed on the frontal area as pictograms:

 

 

 

 

We will see more of the same on the side:

 

 

 

Also here we will be able to locate the box contents list:

 

 

 

On the opposite side we will get to find the system requirements:

 

 

 

If we would like to see the product main features in more detail, we are invited to check the back side of the box, which does exactly that:

 

 

 

 

After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with one large black box, which features the HIS logo in the middle:

 

 

 

After removing the top cover, we will get to see some of the card bundle which is composed from a leaflet which shows the current installation of the card and a small envelope:

 

 

 

The envelope does contain the installation disk, one multi-language installation guide but also a small case sticker; we would recommend downloading and using the latest AMD drivers from their website instead since the Catalyst 15.7 Omega drivers have just been released and yes, they are WHQL too:

 

 

 

The card sits in a thick layer of foam material and is also wrapped inside an anti-static bag in order to avoid damages during transit:

 

 

 

 

The design of the HIS R9 390X IceQ X2 OC 8GB is similar to the one we have found with the R9 290X variant and includes a large top metallic shroud with a golden paint applied to it:

 

 

 

This time, HIS has also attached some stickers on the laterals for more eye-candy:

 

 

 

 

A chromed IceQ X2 logo is available on the top left area of the shroud:

 

 

 

The dual 90mm two-ball bearing fans were built to be silent, with a life span rated at 50000 hours:

 

 

 

If we look on the card sides, we will be able to spot the dual 8mm heatpipes but also three 6mm which are meant to evacuate the heat from the GPU copper plate and bring it to the large aluminum fin heatsink:

 

 

 

 

HIS has also equipped this version with a handle, for easy manipulation:

 

 

 

On the back side of the PCB we can see a dedicated plate, also sporting the HIS logo and together with the frontal reinforcement plate HIS made sure that the PCB won’t bend. Be aware though that the backplate is quite toasty during gaming sessions and people may get burned if they think to touch it:

 

 

 

The cooler extends more than the PCB length so the total size of the card is 29.7cm:

 

 

 

In the vicinity of the metallic handle we will also find the small BIOS switch:

 

 

 

On the I/O we will find a small grill for hot air evacuation, two DVI ports with HDCP support, one HDMI and one DisplayPort 1.2 port:

 

 

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 4690K Retail @ 4.6GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX

Motherboard: BIOSTAR Z97X Gaming

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Currently reviewed card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB + OCZ Vertex 460

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

With the help of the GPU-Z utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

 

 

To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

 

 

 

Temperature tests:

For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at the 1920x1080 resolution for an additional 15 to 20 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 26.5 degrees Celsius:

 

 

Noise measurements

Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 29.1 dBA (with everything turned off).

At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.

The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the MSI Afterburner utility:

 

 

 

3DMark 11

 

3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for measuring your PC's gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 consistently and reliably tests your PC's DirectX 11 performance under game-like loads.

 

 

3DMark 2013

 

3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware in one app. Whether you're gaming on a smart phone, tablet, notebook, laptop, desktop, or a high performance gaming PC, 3DMark includes a benchmark designed specifically for your type of device. And it's not just for Windows. You can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too. It's the best 3DMark we've ever created.

 

 

Unigine Heaven 4.0

 

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

 

 

Hitman Absolution

 

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth video game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth installment in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier 2 game engine.

 

 

DIRT: Rally V0.5

 

Dirt Rally is a racing video game developed and published by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows. An early access version of the game was released on 27 April 2015, via digital distribution service Steam.

 

 

Sleeping Dogs

 

Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games and Square Enix London. It was published by Square Enix and Bandai Namco Games for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles.

 

 

Tomb Raider

 

Tomb Raider is a media franchise that began as a video game series and includes comic books, novels, theme park rides, and movies, centering around the adventures of the British archaeologist Lara Croft.

 

 

Sniper Elite III

 

Sniper Elite III is a tactical shooter video game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by 505 Games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

 

 

Metro Last Light

 

Metro: Last Light is a single-player post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver.

 

 

Bioshock Infinite

 

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games.

 

 

Crysis 2

 

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts and released in North America, Australia and Europe in March 2011 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

 

 

Batman Arhkam Origins

 

Batman: Arkham Origins is a 2013 action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montréal and released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 video game consoles.

 

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open world action-adventure video game set within Tolkien's legendarium, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

 

 

Alien: Isolation

 

Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival horror stealth video game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega.

 

 

Grid Autosport

 

Grid Autosport is a racing video game released by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 24 June 2014 in North America and 27 June 2014 in Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

It is time to draw up the final conclusions regarding the newly released HIS R9 390X IceQ X² OC 8GB video card from HIS: we are indeed dealing with a refresh of the previous Hawaii XT GPU now baptized Grenada XT, featuring GCN 1.1, 6200 million transistors, 2816 shading units, 176 TMUs, 64ROPs and 44 Compute Units. The available VRAM is now 8GB instead of 4GB GDDR5 and now runs at higher frequencies than on 290X cards by default (1500MHz, 6000MHz effective); this surely helps when running multiple cards for a CrossFireX setup and using multiple monitors. Speaking of the frequencies, the defaults of the GPU on OEM cards have been raised to 1050MHz and with its pre-overclocked card HIS has added extra 20MHz.

 

As you have probably seen from other 390X from other manufacturers the reviewers have succeeded to bring the GPU over 1100MHz, this without raising the voltages; with our sample we haven’t been so lucky so we have only succeeded to run at 1090MHz without artifacting, but the memory had other story, being quite overclockable.

 

 

 

With this new series, HIS saw fit to re-use their previous, proven cooling system which we have also found with their 290X and while we have seen similar temperatures on the GPU, the 390X VRM was a little bit hotter, but all within safe limits.

 

The current price of this card is 439 Euros online and establishes itself near the lower-priced cards which is great! Despite the fact that we are talking about a 290X with small improvements and double VRAM, we would recommend it to people which would like to invest in a multi-card setup, so they would benefit from the extra included memory. In a single-card setup, there will be many times when the extra 4GB won’t be used at all, but the card can handle even some titles in 4K if we would fiddle a bit with the detail levels and without any applied filtering.

 

HIS Radeon R9 390X IceQ X2 OC 8GB Video Card is Recommended For:

 

 

We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!