Question 1

Will this work on a 500 Watt PSU?

Accepted Answer

It could work on a 500 watt psu as long as it has two 75w 6-pin PCI express power connectors and the rest of the PC components don't overload the PSU.

Question 2

It says DirectX 12, but will it work with DirectX 11?

Accepted Answer

Yes it will work with DirectX 11 as well. I have been impressed with this card. I highly recommend it.

Question 3

Will the sapphire nitro R9 390 8GB card be better than this 4gb R9 380 for my Rig? I have an AMD FX-8320 processor? I also have about 16gb of memory stick.

Accepted Answer

This card runs great but I don't do any gaming with it. I do think that because the R9 390 is double the memory and is the next level up from mine that it should be faster for your purposes. I have the AMD FX 6100, 32 gigs memory, 1 Ter HDD, 480 gigs SSD. Every couple years I upgrade my system to keep up. The newest upgrades were the Saphire Nitro R9 380 4 GB, went from 16 to 32 gigs memory, the SSD 480 GB and Windows 10. I noticed a big difference in speed with these upgrades.

Question 4

Does this card support crossfire, can i link two of them together?

Accepted Answer

Also, if you are planning on buying 2 of these just to crossfire, don't. You should always get 1 powerful card instead of buying 2 less powerful ones. At the price point of 2 380's you could get a 390x and then a second 390x later on when needed. Keep in mind though that when you SLI/Crossfire you only get the VRAM of one of the cards. So 2 4GB cards doesn't equal 8GB of VRAM, it would be 4GB.

Question 5

Specifically, how loud are the fans?

Accepted Answer

I dont have a db tool, but they dont seem to be real loud. I tend to hear my cruddy case fans more often and even with a fan speed tool set to max was not unbearable...

As of 6/01/16 there are issues with windows 10 and some graphics cards... this is one of the cards, in short, using windows 10? I would wait on this card.

Long version : if you are wanting to use the hdmi out (for tv) the sound will stop continuously, also when gaming, crashes to desktop occur and DO NOT seem to be the card,  but rather driver conflicts with windows 10(not just amd, but all) and (re)updating drivers in device manager will get them working again. These issues tend to happen frequently ( hourly) sound happens everytime sleep mode happens, and sometimes when listening to music for long periods, unfortunately the issue  involving a return to desktop has ruined fallout4 for me as it will happen too often and corrupt a game file :(, other less intensive games like banished are not safe either,  again does not seem to be CARD related as amd will simply have a generic error... and in my personal opinion it seems to happens conflict with cortana.

Question 6

Would I be able to use this in a Crossfire setup with my old video card, a Radeon HD 7870? From best I can tell the answer is no but I'm not entirely certain, hence asking here.

Accepted Answer

It may work, you need to try, because some newer cards are capable of pairing with 7000-series cards based on the Graphics Core Next 1.0 "Southern Islands" architecture. For example, an R9-280X card can be used in a CrossFireX setup together with a HD 7970 card.

Question 7

which way do the fans blow air on this card? Into the card itself out from the card?

Accepted Answer

It pulls air into the card, towards the bottom, away from itself, and out the top as well. This card has great cooling and is silent. You can run its fans up to 55% and have a stable 30C temperature and as high as 60C when at full load, and not make much noise either.

Question 8

Anyone know if I can Crossfire this with an XFX R9 380 4GB GPU (similar specs)?

(Yeah, I know I should've bought an R9 390 in the first place, but - now - "it is what it is" lol)

Accepted Answer

Yes.

Question 9

Will this work with a motherboard that has PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot? I ask due to before buying a PCIe 3.0 card it wouldnt work with the 2.0. So I dont want to buy something that would not work with it

Accepted Answer

You won' have any problems with what PCIe version the card and the motherboard have. PCIe 3.0 cards are compatible with PCIe 2.0 slots on motherboards.

Question 10

What are the physical dimensions of this unit?

Accepted Answer

9.3 x 4.96 x 1.46 Dimension /Inch
237.35 x 126.15 x 37 Dimension /mm

Questions & Answers