Sapphire Introduces New Flagship GPU, AMD R9 300 Nitro Series Cards

Sapphire unveiled the new Nitro series of graphics cards based on the latest AMD Radeon R9 300 series of GPUs. In addition, Sapphire also introduced a new flagship outside of the Nitro series.

These long-awaited GPUs feature the latest standards and technologies in gaming. The cards fully support the upcoming DirectX 12 gaming API, in addition to FreeSync, TrueAudio, Liquid VR, VSR scaling and Ultra HD support. Further, all cards in the Nitro series feature long life capacitors and Sapphire's Black Diamond chokes, giving the Sapphire Tri-X R9 390X the potential to last longer.

Sapphire's flagship GPU is the Sapphire Tri-X R9 390X, featuring new dual ball bearing fans that should improve the lifespan and performance relative to the old Tri-X cooler used on the R9 290X. The fans can turn off completely under a light load thanks to Sapphire's Intelligent Fan Control (IFC-II) technology, resulting in silent operation when not gaming or rendering.

Sapphire's AMD R9 390X comes loaded with 2816 Stream Processors clocked at 1055 MHz, and it packs a whopping 8 GB of GDDR5 clocked at 6000 MHz to support gaming on ultra high resolutions.

Next we have the Sapphire Nitro R9 390, which utilizes the same cooler as the faster Tri-X R9 390X. Overall, the Nitro R9 390 should be just marginally slower, featuring 2560 Stream Processors running at 1010 MHz, supported by 8 GB of GDDR5 clocked at 6000 MHz.

In the R9 380 range of cards, Sapphire introduced the Sapphire Nitro R9 380 with a smaller Dual-X cooler that is similar to the Tri-X, also featuring dual ball bearing fans and IFC-II, but with only two fans instead of three. Sapphire did not disclose the size of its Tri-X fans, but the Dual-X cooler utilizes 10 cm fans which appear to be larger than the fans present on the Tri-X cooler.

The Sapphire Nitro R9 380 comes loaded with 1792 Stream Processors clocked at 985 MHz and packing 4 GB of GDDR5 running at 5800 MHz.

Finally, the last GPU introduced in the Nitro series today is the Sapphire Nitro R7 370. This GPU utilizes the same Dual-X fan as the Sapphire Nitro R9 380. The Stream Processor count in this unit takes a dive down to 1024 with the same 985 MHz core clock, but it maintains the 4 GB of GDDR5, operating at a slightly slower 5600 MHz. All of these GPUs are available now.

But Wait, There's More

In addition to the Nitro series of cards and Sapphire's Radeon Tri-X R9 390X, we spotted another four GPUs on Newegg that Sapphire did not send us information on.

Two of the other cards are nearly identical to the Sapphire Radeon Nitro R9 380 and Sapphire Radeon Nitro R9 370, with very subtle changes in clock speed and dropping down to 2 GB of GDDR5 instead of 4 GB.

A third Sapphire Radeon R9 380 is listed also, closer to the non-Nitro variant, but utilizing only a single fan cooling system. This card is targeted towards the ITX cases that often can't fit a GPU with a long dual-fan cooling system.

The last card is completely new and doesn't have a close counterpart in the Nitro series. This is the Sapphire Radeon R7 360, which features 768 Stream Processors, 2 GB of GDDR5 and a single-fan cooling system.

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