AMD to release R9 390X to fight GeForce GTX 980 ?

Okay. so this is rumor extravaganza in its biggest form. but word on the street is that the GTX 980 will perform much better then everybody anticipates. That should get AMD worries, so this new rumor just popped onto the mighty interwebs, AMD would be preparing Radeon R9 390X graphics card. And the 'leaker' isn't a small one, it is Asetek who provides the liquid cooling for this product who spilled the beans.

Pictures of a cooler shroud are now showing in Chinese tech forums, it shows a design close to the Radeon R9 295X2, only designed for single-GPU.  Specs of the R9 390X are not known to date, the product could even be based on the upcoming "Pirate Islands" family of GPUs. The R9 285 is already part of that family with Tonga. So, is this "Fiji." ??

Thursday, August 14, 2014 — Asetek® today announced that it has secured a design win with an undisclosed OEM customer for a graphics liquid cooling product. The ambitious project is forecasted by the customer to result in 2 – 4 million dollars of revenue. Shipping is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2015. The design win continues Asetek’s success in the growing graphics liquid cooling market.

Hopefully this does not mean that AMD's Next Generation GPUs will be as famously hot running as the last. But it seems that AMD either were not willing to design a new reference cooler themselves or could not make a cooler powerful enough an quiet enough with an air based cooling solution.

It will be interesting to see what this means for Future aftermarket AMD GPUs from the likes of ASUS, MSI, etc as their custon GPU coolers will have to compete with a reference design which is watercooled. Then again this could means that aftermarket models could be cheaper than reference as their coolers may be cheaper to use than an AIO water cooler.