AMD Radeon R9 390X Pictured – Fiji XT, HBM, Small Form Factor And Water Cooling

Ok folks, prepare to lay your eyes on the first actual teaser image featuring a Fiji XT powered water-cooled graphics card by AMD. Now I’ve chosen those words very carefully. This is undoubtedly the Fiji powered “ultra enthusiast” flagship Radeon that AMD teased at GDC. The card that will likely be dubbed and sold as the R9 390X. However we can’t confirm that exact nomenclature at this present time but we’ll assume that’s what AMD will call it.

The card features AMD’s black and silver color scheme that’s become the signature for the company’s top-end water-cooled Radeon boards. As you can see in the background the GPU is cooled by what appears to be a 120mm water-cooling radiator. The graphics card itself is actually quite small, nearly half the length of the R9 295X2. Which is to be expected since AMD promised compact form factors for its upcoming HBM powered flagship at the Financial Analyst Day.

AMD Radeon R9 390X Pictured – Fiji XT, HBM, Small Form Factor and Water Cooling

We’ve discussed this before when we exclusively reported that AMD will make a water cooled version of the Fiji board. Having the HBM DRAM packaged along with the GPU die on an interposer cuts significantly on the PCB area that would normally be needed to house GDDR5 memory chips. Moving towards the back of the card. We can see that there are three full sized DisplayPorts and one full sized HDMI port with no DVI ports. Surprisingly the card is still a dual-slot design with ventilation holes at the back, even though it appears to feature pure water cooling, rather than Hybrid liquid and air cooling like the R9 295X2.

Fiji will be AMD’s upcoming flagship GPU that is set to power the Radeon R9 390 series graphics cards. Two weeks ago we reported that HBM production is ramping up for the upcoming Radeon flagship. And prior to that we had AMD stating that they’ll publicly talk about the new GPUs sometime later this quarter, likely at Computex in June. So that’s likely when we’ll have an official reveal of the new R 300 series. AMD reiterated again today during the Financial Analyst Day that the new graphics cards will launch in Q2 2015 at “upcoming events”, referring to Computex and E3.

AMD Fiji XT GPU With HBM Memory Teased

Update: You know what’s better than one teaser? Two teasers and this time we don’t have the shot of the card itself but the actual chip that will be powering the next generation AMD flagship card. The GPU shown in the picture is without a doubt AMD’s next generation Fiji XT chip which will be powering the Radeon R9 390X card and comes with HBM memory on the interposer as shown in the image above. This saves much space from the PCB to achieve designs that weren’t possible with previous generation cards. Hence we are looking at a totally new design scheme for the Radeon R9 390X graphics card. The second image shows what looks to be the same card from a different position and it is illuminating red led light. We can also seen a slight section of the tubing that will lead to the main radiator to cool of the card.

It has been officially confirmed that AMD’s upcoming Fiji GPU, R9 390X, will be the world’s first to feature stacked High Bandwidth Memory.  HBM represents the revolutionary step that has been so badly needed in the evolution of memory standards. The first generation of HBM promises to deliver 4.5X the bandwidth of GDDR5 and a staggering 16 times the bandwidth of DDR3.

Note that single channel DDR3 controllers normally have 32bit wide I/O. Leading to 8GB/s bandwidth. But that number is still eclipsed by the 128 GB/s figure for first generation HBM.
The second generation promises to double the bandwidth by doubling the speed from 1Gbps to 2Gbps. While also quadrupling the memory capacity for 4-Hi stacks from 1GB to 4GB. HBM2 will be featured in AMD’s upcoming Arctic Islands graphics architecture with the “Greenland” flagship GPU.

Below are the specifications for Fiji based on the R9 390X WCE rumor. and the SiSoft Sandra database leak.

WCCFTech	AMD Radeon R9 390X	AMD Radeon R9 290X
GPU Code Name	Fiji XT	Hawaii XT
GPU Cores / Shaders	4096	2816
Memory	8GB Stacked HBM	4GB GDDR5
Memory  Frequency	1.25Ghz	5.0Ghz
Memory Interface	4096 Wide IO	512bit GDDR5
Total Memory Bandwidth	640GB/S	320GB/S
GPU  Clock Speed	1.05Ghz	1Ghz
Compute Performance	8.5TFLOP*	5.6TFLOP
Launch Price	?	$549

* Estimated from core count and clock speed.

Finally I should mention that the final retail product may differ slightly in its aesthetic look but the primary attributes of the card as you see it in the image featured at the beginning of the article such as the form factor and the water cooling will remain exactly the same.