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ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380X review: One more graphics card for the mainstream

By Koh Wanzi - 20 Nov 2015

Conclusion

Just another option for the mainstream

The Radeon R9 380X's biggest contribution may just be serving up more choices to consumers.

When all’s said and done, the Radeon R9 380X is just another option for mainstream consumers. The R9 380 was a rebranded version of the Tonga GPU on the R9 285, and the R9 380X simply builds on that with a fully-enabled (and renamed) Antigua XT GPU with more stream processors.

The R9 380 was nothing new, and neither is the R9 380X. It retains all the features of the AMD 300 series cards like Frame Rate Target Control, Asynchronous Shaders, and Virtual Super Resolution, while adding a bit more performance onto the table.

It looks like AMD might be trying to plug the price and performance gap between the R9 380 and R9 390, which is in all honesty quite large. The US$329 Radeon R9 390 was anywhere north of 40% faster than the US$199 Radeon R9 380, and while you can probably justify shelling out over US$100 more for the fairly big jump in performance, AMD may have been hoping to offer an additional fresh option for gamers deciding between the R9 380 and 390 (without resorting to selecting a card from the 'older' 200-series). On the NVIDIA front, AMD has said that the R9 380X is intended as a replacement for older cards like the GeForce GTX 660 and 760.

AMD has priced the Radeon R9 380X at US$229 (we don't have the local pricing of the ASUS card yet), only US$30 more than the Radeon R9 380. That seems reasonable for the roughly 7-10% performance increase that you’re getting on the R9 380X, and may be a good choice for gamers who aren’t happy with the Radeon R9 380’s performance, but don’t have the budget to make the leap to the R9 390. However, if you were looking for a card that fits neatly in the middle between the R9 380 and R9 390, the R9 380X is unfortunately not that card as the R9 390 is still at least 30% quicker in most situations, and its 8GB of GDDR5 memory (compared to the 4GB on the R9 380X) helps it deal with the increasing memory bandwidth demands of recent games.

One other caveat is that the R9 380X is probably better suited to gaming at 1440p resolutions as opposed to 1080p. At the latter resolutions, you may just want to consider the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. It’s more expensive of course, but it offers significantly better performance without as big a price tag as the Radeon R9 390 series. Still, we welcome AMD’s introduction of the R9 380X. Whichever way you parse it, more choice for consumers is always a good thing.

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7.5
  • Performance 7
  • Features 8
  • Value 8
The Good
Cool temperatures and relatively low power consumption
Decent performance for its price
The Bad
Not that much better than the Radeon R9 380
Not as competitive at 1080p resolutions
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