A card for casual gamers who want playable frame rates at 1440p resolutions.
CONCLUSION
A card for casual gamers who want playable frame rates at 1440p resolutions.
Just when we thought that we’d seen everything from AMD this year, the company sprung the Radeon R9 380X on us, which is basically a Radeon R9 380 with a greater number of stream processors, texture mapping units and higher clock speeds.As per most custom cards, the core clock has also been factory overclocked to 1,030MHz, up from 970MHz. A dedicated OC mode raises this to 1,050MHz for a slight performance boost.
The ASUS card is tricked out with all the usual bells-and-whistles that we’ve come to expect from them. It uses the familiar dual-fan DirectCU II cooler, complete with a stylized cooling shroud and metal backplate.There are no surprises when it comes to the fans, which use a semi-passive design that allows them to power down entirely when the GPU’s temperature falls below the 55-57°C range. And considering that the GPU idles at around 38°C, you shouldn’t see the temperature rise above the specified range with general tasks like web browsing.
You should get to work, read, and surf the Web in relative quiet.It is powered by two 6-pin PCIe power connectors, a change from the single 8-pin connector on the Strix Radeon R9 380.There are two LEDs above the connectors that will glow white when a successful connection has been established, which will help you rule out lose connections when troubleshooting.In 3DMark 2013, the Radeon R9 380X was a good 15% faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960. However, it was just 7-8% faster than the Radeon R9 380.
The R9 380X also took a fairly large 24% lead over the 2GB version of the R9 380 in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, but we expect the difference to narrow with the 4GB version. At a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels and Ultra settings, the card managed a playable average of 33.51fps, so it certainly can deliver on its promise of 1440p gaming. Still, one caveat is that you might not be able to crank up eye candy like anti-aliasing if you want an optimal experience.
When it came to overclocking, we could only achieve a core clock of 1,060MHz and memory overclock of 6,000MHz, which resulted in just a 3% boost in performance in 3DMark. If you’re looking for free performance via overclocking, the R9 380X isn’t the card for you.
The card is powered by two 6-pin PCIe connectors.
AT A GLANCE
GPU Transistor Count: 5 billion, Core Clock: 1,030MHz, Memory: 4GB GDDR5, Memory Clock: (DDR)5,700MHz, Price: $259.
