Product Listing

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

By Koh Wanzi - 20 Nov 2015

Performance Results

Test Setup

Here are the specifications of our graphics test bed:

  • Intel Core i7-5960X
  • ASUS X99-Pro (Intel X99 chipset) motherboard
  • 2 x 4GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDRR-2133 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-36)
  • Corsair Force LX 256GB SSD (OS)
  • Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (Benchmarks + Games)
  • Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
  • Intel INF 10.0.20

For our comparisons, we rounded up the AMD cards directly above and below the R9 380X in AMD’s product hierarchy, which means the Radeon R9 380, R9 390, and R9 390X. On top of that, we also threw in the Palit GeForce GTX 970 JetStream and ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960, the closest comparable NVIDIA cards.

However, do note that because of the upcoming release of AMD’s new Crimson software, these results may be subject to change as the new Radeon Software: Crimson edition will supposedly bring certain performance improvements. Nevertheless, because our test benchmark titles are mostly over a year old, we don’t expect major changes when Crimson releases. But whatever may be the case, these results should still serve as a general indicator of the performance of the R9 380X relative to the other cards.

Below is the full list of cards tested and their driver versions:

  • ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380X DirectCU II OC 4G (AMD Catalyst Display Driver 15.201.1301.0 WHQL)
  • ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380 DirectCU II OC 2G (AMD Catalyst Display Driver 15.200.1062.1004 WHQL)
  • PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 (AMD Catalyst Display Driver 15.200.1046.0 WHQL)
  • MSI Radeon R9 390X Gaming 8G (AMD Catalyst Display Driver 15.200.1046.0 WHQL)
  • Palit GeForce GTX 970 JetStream (ForceWare 353.30)
  • ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960 (ForceWare 353.30)

 

Benchmarks

As this is our first review of the Radeon R9 380X, we’ll be running our complete suite of synthetic and gaming benchmarks to get an idea of its full performance characteristics:-

  • Futuremark 3DMark 2013
  • Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
  • Crysis 3
  • Tomb Raider
  • Hitman: Absolution
  • Thief

For our temperature and power consumption tests, we used the Fire Strike Extreme benchmark in 3DMark 2013.

Before diving into the full results, here's a table to show how the Radeon R9 380X stacks up against the immediate competition:

ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380X and competitive SKUs compared
  ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380X ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380 PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 ASUS Strix Radeon R9 390X DirectCU III OC Palit GeForce GTX 970 JetStream ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960
  ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380X ASUS Strix Radeon R9 380 PowerColor PCS+ R9 390 ASUS Strix Radeon R9 390X DirectCU III OC Palit GeForce GTX 970 JetStream ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 960
Launch SRP
  • From S$399
  • From S$519
  • From S$739
  • From S$479
  • From S$369
Core Code
  • Antigua
  • Hawaii
  • Grenada XT
  • Maxwell
  • GM206
GPU Transistor Count
  • 5 billion
  • 6.2 billion
  • 6.2 billion
  • 5.2 billion
  • 2.94 billion
Manufacturing Process
  • 28nm
  • 28nm
  • 28nm
  • 28nm
  • 28nm
Core Clock
  • 990MHz
  • 1010MHz
  • 1070MHz
  • 1152MHz
  • Gaming mode: 1228MHz (Boost: 1291MHz)
  • OC mode: 1253MHz (Boost: 1317MHz)
Stream Processors
  • 1792
  • 2560
  • 2816
  • 1664
  • 1024
Stream Processor Clock
  • 990MHz (Default)
  • 1010MHz (OC mode)
  • 1010MHz
  • 1070MHz
  • 1152MHz
  • 1228MHz
Texture Mapping Units (TMUs)
  • 112
  • 160
  • 176
  • 104
  • 64
Raster Operator units (ROP)
  • 32
  • 64
  • 64
  • 56
  • 32
Memory Clock (DDR)
  • 5500MHz
  • 6000MHz
  • 6000MHz
  • 7000MHz
  • 7200MHz
Memory Bus width
  • 256-bit
  • 512-bit
  • 512-bit
  • 256-bit
  • 128-bit
Memory Bandwidth
  • 176GB/s
  • 384Gb/s
  • 384GB/s
  • 224Gb/s
  • 115.20 GB/s
PCI Express Interface
  • PCIe 3.0 x16
  • PCIe 3.0 x16
  • PCIe 3.0 x16
  • PCIe 3.0 x16
  • PCI Express 3.0
Power Connectors
  • 1x 8-pin
  • 1x 6-pin, 1x 8-pin
  • 1x 6-pin, 1x 8-pin
  • 2x 6-pin
  • 1 x 6-pin
Multi GPU Technology
  • CrossFire
  • CrossFire
  • CrossFire
  • SLI
  • SLI
DVI Outputs
  • 2
  • 2
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
HDMI Outputs
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
  • 1
DisplayPort Outputs
  • 1
  • 1
  • 3
  • 2x miniDP
  • 3
HDCP Output Support
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes
  • Yes

 

Performance Results

 

3DMark 2013

3DMark is our go-to synthetic benchmark for testing the graphics performance of cards at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. Unsurprisingly, there was a close pairing of results between the R9 380X and R9 380, and the R9 390X and R9 390, with a much greater difference between the two pairs. This pattern was also something that we continued to observe in the rest of our gaming benchmarks.

In 3DMark FireStrike and FireStrike Extreme, the R9 380X was about 7-8% faster than the R9 380. This gap widened to around 28% in FireStrike Ultra, but we’re not paying too much attention to those results as both cards are rather ill-suited to 4K gaming.

The R9 380X was also approximately a good 15% faster than the GeForce GTX 960. However, both the GeForce GTX 970 and R9 390 were roughly 30% faster than the former card. This is quite a large performance gap, but one that is to be expected given the potential price difference between the two.

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

Shadow of Mordor is a fairly taxing game that demands quite a bit of graphics memory, especially at the Ultra settings that we ran the benchmark at. At a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels, the R9 380X turned out to be around 24% faster than the R9 380. As in 3DMark, there was also a huge performance gap between the R9 380X and the R9 390, with the latter pushing out nearly twice the number of frames.

In fact, it looks like the 8GB of GDDR5 memory on the R9 390 and 390X is coming into play here. The GeForce GTX 970 was fairly close in performance to the two in 3DMark, but it fell behind in Shadow of Mordor, perhaps due to its having just 4GB of GDDR5 memory.

As a result, the 24% difference we noted between the R9 380X and 380 might even narrow slightly if you opt for the 4GB version of the R9 380 (ours was the 2GB version).

 

Crysis 3

There were less stark performance differences in Crysis 3, where the R9 380X was around 7% quicker than the R9 380. The R9 380X also closed the performance gap with the R9 390 series cards somewhat, although the difference was still by no means small – the R9 390 was about 18% faster than the R9 380X at a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels with anti-aliasing turned off.

Turning on 8X MSAA in Crysis 3 resulted in all the cards taking a huge performance hit. The average frame rates on the R9 380X just about halved at both tested resolutions, so this is something to take note of if you’re the sort that likes to crank up all the eye candy to maximum.

 

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is starting to show its age in our benchmarks, and we’re used to seeing most recent releases churn out more than playable frame rates in the game. This was the case with the R9 380X as well, and it was approximately 10% faster than the R9 380.

However, the R9 390 series cards and the GeForce GTX 970 once again leapt ahead here, with the latter even outstripping the former by a good margin. As we’ve noted repeatedly in our previous reviews, AMD’s latest batch of cards don’t really thrive at lower resolutions compared to NVIDIA’s offerings.

 

Hitman Absolution

Hitman Absolution is also another game that is getting slightly long in the tooth, but it still manages to demand quite a bit when anti-aliasing is turned on. Like we saw in Crysis 3, all the cards once again showed a large performance drop with 8X MSAA turned on. The R9 380X still managed a playable average of 26.91fps at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels with 8X AA, but cranking things up to 1600p made things absolutely unplayable.

As a result, when it comes to MSAA at least (which is generally one of the more demanding forms of AA), you’re going to have to pick between a higher resolution or anti-aliasing. Of course, one thing to note is that higher resolutions do reduce jagged edges and thus mitigate the need for anti-aliasing, so it might turn out to not be much of a trade off after all.

At a resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 pixels and no AA, the R9 380X was about 7% faster than the R9 380, which so far seems to be the average difference that we’ve observed across benchmarks.

 

Thief

The R9 380X put out numbers that were very close to those of the R9 380 in Thief. In all four of our tested settings, the cards were within just a couple of frame of each other. This was the case for the R9 390X and 390 as well, and it looks like Thief doesn’t fully utilize the greater number of stream processors on the top cards in the R9 380 and 390 series.

Furthermore, the NVIDIA cards did rather well here. Again, this was something we observed in our previous reviews, where this year’s AMD cards showed a heavy emphasis on performance at 1440p and up as opposed to the less demanding 1080p resolution. This is clearly seen in the results, where the GeForce GTX 960 outstripped the R9 380X at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels and the Low preset, only to fall behind as the settings were cranked up.

 

Temperature and Power Consumption

Our temperature tests are conducted by looping 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme for a little while and then checking the highest recorded temperature. Interestingly enough, the R9 380X ran 4°C cooler than the R9 380 despite its higher clock speeds. Along with the R9 390, it was the coolest card in this comparison.

The R9 380X and R9 380 cards we tested both came from ASUS, and they both use very similar, if not identical, cooling designs. As a result, the lower temperature of the R9 380X vis-à-vis the R9 380 could be due to a variety of other factors like chip binning.

In fact, power consumption on the R9 380X was also slightly lower than that on the R9 380, so it may be that chips on the R9 380X are simply more power efficient.

 

Overclocking

In the overclocking department, the R9 380X unfortunately turned out to be a lackluster overclocker. While we were able to push the core clock to 1,100MHz on the R9 380, we were only able to hit 1,060MHz on the R9 380X. Things were better when it came to memory overclocking though, and we managed to achieve an effective memory clock of 6,000MHz on the R9 380X.

This resulted in just a 3% boost in performance in 3DMark, which probably is not going to translate into any significant gain in actual games. So if you want a card that offers up truckloads of free performance via overclocking, the R9 380X is probably not it.

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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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