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.