The Radeon R9 380X is AMD's attempt at capturing the sub-$250 segment, where NVIDIA has a hole in their product stack between the GTX 960 and GTX 970. The card is based on the Tonga silicon, AMD's second-newest graphics processor, which we have seen on the R9 285 and R9 380 before. The card ups the stock memory size for this segment to 4 GB from 2 GB, which leads to a visible performance boost in certain scenarios, such as 4K with the most demanding titles, but the impact on 1080p, the recommend resolution for this card, is small. You should also be able to get decent framerates at 1440p if you are willing to sacrifice some details. Overall, the R9 380X is roughly just as fast as the R9 280X, with the ASUS overclocked variant gaining a few extra percentage points over it. Compared to NVIDIA's lineup, the ASUS STRIX ends up roughly in the middle of the GTX 960 (25% faster) and GTX 970 (30% slower). An interesting value proposition is the aging AMD R9 290, which is 24% faster than ASUS' overclocked card, yet comes at very affordable pricing.

AMD has been behind NVIDIA in power consumption efficiency for a while now, and the R9 380X is no exception, but given the total heat output is well manageable with around 170 W, the thermal solutions doesn't have to be big and bulky. ASUS' STRIX cooler does a great job at keeping the card cool, with only 69°C under load and 57°C in idle. 57°C in idle might sound high at first, but you have to consider that the card turns its fans off in idle and light gaming, which results in a completely noise-free experience for desktop work and media playback. During gaming, the fan ramps up slightly, but ends up at a very quiet 29 dBA, which is quieter than most competing cards from AMD (I'm thinking of the R9 280X and R9 290). When compared to custom designs of the GTX 970, most are in the same noise range, so AMD (or more precisely ASUS), finally has a winner on their hands that can also compete with NVIDIA's offerings in terms of noise - extra points to ASUS for including a backplate instead of saving a dollar or two.

At around 10%, overclocking performance is roughly as expected. I did notice that memory overclocking seems to hit a wall at 1638 MHz, though, as soon as you increase clocks by another MHz, which has the card go to a black screen, suggesting an issue with how the memory chip timings are configured and not properly recalculated at higher clocks.

Price-wise, AMD is asking $229 for the reference-clocked R9 380X variants, which I find a bit high. If you look at our price/performance graphs, you will find pretty much every competing board offering a similar or better deal. The leader here is the R9 290, which is 24% faster, but comes at only $240. Next up is the R9 380, performing 12% worse than the ASUS STRIX, but priced at an even more affordable $180. And finally we have the GTX 970, which is a well-tested, proven, and extremely well-supported product by NVIDIA, with 30% more performance than the 380X at about 30% higher pricing ($290). The extra $10 ASUS is asking for their STRIX OC are well invested. The highlight here is definitely the excellent cooler with its good fan settings, but the overclock out of the box helps as well. Overall, the R9 380X is a good measure at the price point it is at, but I would have wished for more competitive pricing, so that it can really capture this price-bracket, not just cannibalize NVIDIA's sales until they launch a GTX 960 Ti or drop GTX 970 pricing even further.