ASUS Radeon R9 380X Strix 4GB Review

Item: ASUS Radeon R9 380X Strix 4GB
Author: TPU Staff

W1zzard

on Nov 19th, 2015,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASUS

Packaging & Contents »

Introduction

AMD's latest attempt to win a critical sub-$300 price-performance sweet-spot is the Radeon R9 380X, launched today. It capitalizes on a gaping hole in NVIDIA's rivaling product stack set between the $170 GeForce GTX 960 and the $290 GTX 970 with nothing in between. Gamers could benefit from an option somewhere in the middle that lets them max out settings at 1080p, and perhaps even tinker with the higher 1440p resolution at moderately high settings.

The Radeon R9 380X is based on the same silicon as the R9 380, codenamed "Antigua," a rehashed "Tonga" which drives the R9 285. This chip is technologically more up-to-date than the Hawaii-based R9 390 series since it features the company's latest Graphics CoreNext (GCN) 1.2 stream processors. The R9 380X features all 32 GCN compute units physically present on the silicon, which amounts to 2,048 stream processors in total. That also entails a TMU count of 128. There are 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. 4 GB is the standard memory amount for this SKU, and there won't be a 2 GB variant. AMD is pricing this card as low as $229, which definitely puts a lot of pressure on the GTX 960.

In this review, we're testing the ASUS Radeon R9 380X STRIX based on the company's iconic 0 dBA-ready DirectCU II cooling solution, which can turn its fans off below a specific temperature threshold and promises very low noise levels under load. The card comes overclocked out of the box to a GPU clock of 1030 MHz and memory has remained at the AMD default of 1425 MHz. The ASUS R9 380 STRIX is expected to retail at $240, while the reference-clocked Radeon R9 380X variants will retail at around $230.

Radeon R9 380X Market Segment Analysis
	GeForce GTX 960	Radeon R9 285	Radeon R9 380	GeForce GTX 770	Radeon R9 280X	Radeon R9 380X	ASUS R9 380X STRIX	GeForce GTX 780	Radeon R9 290	Radeon R9 390	GeForce GTX 970
Shader Units	1024	1792	1792	1536	2048	2048	2048	2304	2560	2560	1664
ROPs	32	32	32	32	32	32	32	48	64	64	56
Graphics Processor	GM206	Tonga	Tonga	GK104	Tahiti	Tonga	Tonga	GK110	Hawaii	Hawaii	GM204
Transistors	2940M	5000M	5000M	3500M	4310M	5000M	5000M	7100M	6200M	6200M	5200M
Memory Size	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	2048 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	4096 MB	3072 MB	4096 MB	8192 MB	4096 MB
Memory Bus Width	128 bit	256 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	256 bit	256 bit	384 bit	512 bit	512 bit	256 bit
Core Clock	1127 MHz+	918 MHz	970 MHz	1046 MHz+	1000 MHz	970 MHz	1030 MHz	863 MHz+	947 MHz	1000 MHz	1051 MHz+
Memory Clock	1753 MHz	1375 MHz	1375 MHz	1753 MHz	1500 MHz	1425 MHz	1425 MHz	1502 MHz	1250 MHz	1500 MHz	1750 MHz
Price	$170	$180	$180	$300	$220	$230	$240	$290	$240	$330	$290