Oh well, with ZEN coming next year, and actually not much time to play games in my backlog and Morrowind taking an awful lot of time to complete (I joined all the guilds and organizations I could without cheating or exploiting glitches), I think I'll end up doing a major PC upgrade next year. For the games I'm playing now and the next few ones in my backlog that I'll play, the R7 250 GPU I got last year is more than enough, if really needed I'll try to expand my current 4GB DDR2 ECC RAM without paying it too much (DDR2 isn't produced anymore and last time I checked another 2x2GB kit would have cost me more than what I paid it years before, so I chose to upgrade the GPU, freeing almost all the 512MB of main RAM previously used by the onboard GPU).

More news and rumors about Fiji.

What was only a rumor, although that seemed legit, has now been proven correct. A leaked driver has confirmed the rebranding of some R9 2XX series cards to the new 3XX series. The R9 285, 290 and 290X will come back

That's not surprising, and it's not even bad news as they could simply be rebranded as the R9 370, 380 and 380X.

The problem comes from the ASUS forums (although I still have to see a link that proves it), that has listed new cards, including:

• ASUS R9390X-DC2-8GD5
• ASUC-2GD5S  STRIX-R9380-O
• ASUS  STRIX-R9370-OC-4GD5
• ASUS  STRIX-R7360X-DC2OC2-2GD5
• ASUS  R7360-2GD5

If 390X is Fiji, and Fiji only has 4GB of HBM, how can they list an 8GB variant? Well, it could be that the 390X is Hawaii based like the 290X, not Fiji, and because of that, it will ship with 8GB of GDDR5. Meanehile, the Fiji cards with HBM will have a special name and will compete with TitanX.

Ugh, I hate rebrands. Werent some of those cards already rebrands of the 7000 series? Ill update the OP with your contribution.

Yes, they were rebrands.

HD 7970 GHz Edition => R9 280X
HD 7950 => R9 280
HD 7870 => R9 270X
HD 7850 => R9 270

But keep in mind that they could get higher stock speeds thanks to a more mature 28nm process and refinements on its design, we'll see.

Edit. By the way, I forgot to post the links to those news! The yare from wccftech and videocardz:

http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-r9-390x-hawaii-8-gb-gddr5-spotted-radeon-r9-380-tonga-r9-370-pitcairn-rebrands/

http://videocardz.com/55659/leaked-driver-confirms-hawaii-rebrands-in-radeon-300-series

For those unaware, Gibbo works for overclockers.co.uk, and that makes him a very reliable source. This is the thread where he posted this

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=28091665

Am I reading this correctly? The 260x, 270, 270x, 285, 290, and 290x are getting rebrands. 

So we have,

• 7790 to 260x to 360
• (7870) to 270 to 3xx
• (7870) to 270x to 370
• (7950) to 285 to 3xx
• 290 to 3xx
• 290x to 3xx

Just a little correction, the HD 7950 went to be the R9 280, not the 285.

The 7950 and 7970 were based of Tahiti, which was the first iteration of AMD's Graphics Core Next or GCN. Then came GCN1.1 which was Hawaii and came in the form of the 290 and 290X, and then came GCN1.2 which was Tonga with the 285.

On the 8GB HBM thing... yes, it's very unlikely. It is known that the first iteration of HBM comes in packages of 1GB, and since all the diagrams showed by AMD had only 4 packages, many sites guessed that 4Gb would be the limit.

Later, AMD's Joe Macri said that until now there had been a lack of optimization when it came to the use of memory because with GDDR5 they always worked with more than enough VRAM, but that now they had been working on ways to optimize how the card deals with it with "surprising results". Obviously, AMD wouldn't have to optimize that memory usage unless they went short of it, so the 4GB has been all but confirmed.

What still has to be confirmed is if those optimizations have worked and how "only" having 4GB will impact their performance.

Price is still a mistery, but big chip+new memory+liquid cooling... well, I doubt it will come cheaper than a reference GTX 980.

AMD is teasing us: https://youtu.be/O5bVoIQrH7g

The last pic for now, remember to take that pinch of salt!

Full waterblock, 2x8pin, quite small

Gigabyte rates its Windforce cooler as capable of dissipating 300W. It will be able to handle this card.

And the Twin Frozr from MSI handles the 290X perfectly fine, so it should be able to deal with it too.