AMD Radeon R9 M390X vs AMD Radeon R9 M390 vs AMD Radeon R9 M385X

AMD Radeon R9 M390X

The AMD Radeon R9 M390X is a mobile high-end graphics card for laptops. It is most likely based on the same chip as the AMD Radeon R9 M295X in the iMac 5K Late 2014. That means it should be based on the third generation of GCN (desktop Tonga chip). The amount of shader cores is identical but the core clock is reduced by 15% (from 850 MHz to 723 MHz) and the memory is also clocked slower (5448 MHz vs 5000 MHz).

The performance should be a bit below the M295X. Compared to the competition, the R9-M390X should be positioned somewhere between the GeForce GTX 965M and 970M and therefore suitable for high-end games in 1080p resolution and high detail settings.

The card was first mentioned by Alienware on their twitter account and should feature 4GB VRAM according to the tweet.

The power consumption should be rated around 100 Watt TDP and therefore suited only for large and bulky laptops (like the Alienware M17x it was announced in).

AMD Radeon R9 M390

The AMD Radeon R9 M390 is a mobile graphics card from 2015 and positioned as a fast mid-range GPU. It should be based on the the old Pitcairn chip (e.g. in 2012 used in the desktop 7870 graphics card) and offers 1024 shader cores clocked at 958 MHz. Furthermore, 2 GB GDDR5 dedicated graphics memory are connected via a 256 Bit memory bus. The graphics card is used in the Apple iMac 27-inch late 2015 (mid range model).

The performance of the Radeon R9 M390 slightly above a Nvidia GeForce GTX 960M or 870M but still beyond a desktop Radeon R7 370. Therefore, demanding games of 2015 may only run in medium settings at up to full HD resolutions fluently. The native 5K resolution of the iMac or even the perfectly scaled 2560x1600 will be definitely too much.

AMD Radeon R9 M385X

The AMD Radeon R9 M385X ist a fast mid-range graphics card for laptops. It is based on the GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture (older Strato chip) and is manufactured in 28nm. It offers 14 compute shader s(896 stream processors aka shaders) and a 128 Bit GDDR5 memory interface clocked at 1500 MHz (= 6000 MHz effective). The chip supports DirectX 12 (Feature Level 11_1 = DirectX 11.1) and can be found in the Lenovo Y700 with a AMD FX-8800P APU.