(The 770 also stumbles on several of the latest games, at least at our tested settings, so keep that in mind.) Perhaps slightly more sobering is that an older GTX 770 card is still managing slightly higher frame rates overall, but then that was originally a $400 GPU. Not to put too fine an edge on things, but the R9 380 4GB basically cleans the 2GB 960's clock. Unfortunately, we only have the 2GB model of the GTX 960 on hand, which means it's about $10 cheaper but it has problems with games that need more memory. In terms of pricing, the R9 380 4GB goes up against the GTX 960, with both cards generally available for around $200. We've stuck with graphics cards that cost around $300 or less to keep things simple, since we all know the $500+ behemoths still reign supreme. Here are the details of our GPU test system, which is designed to eliminate other bottlenecks as much as possible. Temperatures also remain frosty, relatively speaking-the GPU maxed out at 70C during an extended gaming session, so there's no difficulty there.Īnd speaking of gaming, let's check out the benchmarks. They're also powerful enough to make a racket if you run them at 100 percent, which shouldn't happen unless you're intentionally overclocking the GPU and cranking up the fan speed.Īt factory settings, the card runs quieter than our CPU cooler and case fans, and even at our maximum overclock it's still not much louder than the rest of our system components. The large fans do require a slightly taller card, but it's only a 5mm difference. There are two large 100mm fans cooling the card, which is sort of crazy to see-I remember when GPUs with 60mm fans were the norm. Sapphire uses the exact same core design for their R9 380X, so the "lesser" GPU still gets plenty of helpful features. Like nearly every mainstream or higher GPU (AMD R7 or Nvidia GTX), this is a dual-slot card. The Sapphire Nitro card is only moderately large. What will our manual overclock (12/9 percent over factory) do for you? Around 5–10 percent more performance, which is nice since it's "free," though it's not usually enough to take a game from stuttering to playable. We managed to run through our benchmarks at 1100/6300 without any problems, but 1125/6500 resulted in a hard system lock, even when sitting at the desktop. Keep your expectations in check, however, as AMD's GCN has not proven nearly as overclocking friendly as Nvidia's Maxwell architecture. You'll need a utility that properly supports Sapphire's GPUs, and in this case you're best off just nabbing Trixx-MSI's Afterburner can't adjust clocks beyond +100MHz. Second, there's always end-user overclocking. Cross-platform gaming support has resulted in many games starting to push the limits on GPUs with less than 4GB VRAM, so if you're looking to move from an older generation mainstream GPU to a new $200 card, the 380 punches well above its weight class. It's true that in many ways performance isn't a huge step up from an old HD 7950 or R9 280, but it does offset things somewhat by including 4GB VRAM. The 20-30MHz bump in core clocks on some models is hardly worth mentioning, so we're looking at the Sapphire card as well as the R9 380 in general.įirst, despite the mainstream pricing, the R9 380 is a very capable GPU. Those cards start at just $185 (opens in new tab) (with rebates bringing the card price as low as $165) meanwhile, the Sapphire card we're looking at is priced at $205 with a mail-in rebate dropping that to $190 (opens in new tab). For example, you can find the card with either 2GB or 4GB of GDDR5 memory, but considering the nearly identical price, we recommend sticking with the 4GB models. We're going to rectify that omission, mostly because as a sub-$200 graphics card, the R9 380 still has a lot to offer. Last year, the R9 380 and 390 series followed up on the existing R9 280/285 and 290 series then later AMD launched the R9 380X (opens in new tab), but we never formally reviewed the R9 380. But along with refinements to the memory interface, Tonga overall is an improvement in efficiency, and it's less expensive to manufacture. Ultimately, performance is rarely more than a few percent faster/slower than the venerable R9 280 (aka HD 7950). When it first showed up as the R9 285, the naming hinted at the similarity, though some would inevitably hope the five point bump in model number would bring a bit more to the floor.
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