As a performance piece, the PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 offers a lot under the hood for its $329 price tag. To start, we get a core that is factory clocked to 1010MHz and 8GB of GDDR5 memory that is again pumped up to 1500MHz right out of the box. This gives it the tools to compete with the R9 290X and make a run at the GTX 970. In most of the tests, however, it just fell short of the mark when trying to match the performance of the GTX 970. In some games it did out perform the GTX 970, but as a whole the bump in clock speed and doubling of the memory is just not enough to get there. The moral of the story is to find out which card is the faster card in the games you play.