Final Words

Bringing this review to a close, for the last 14 months now we’ve been pondering just what a fully enabled Tonga desktop SKU might look like, and with Radeon R9 380X we finally have our answer. With the final 4 CUs enabled – bringing us from 28 CUs to 32 CUs – Radeon R9 380X picks up where R9 380 left off and adds a further 10% in performance. This is a bit less than the 14% we’d expect to gain going from CU counts alone, but at the same time few games are purely CU limited. So in a mixed selection of games this is a pretty reasonable outcome.

This also means that R9 380X essentially picks up from where AMD’s past Tahiti cards like the 7970 and R9 280X left off. As the successor-of-sorts to AMD’s original GCN GPU, Tahiti, Tonga brings with it some welcome feature upgrades that otherwise left Tahiti dated. So within AMD’s lineup it’s now Tonga that’s anchoring the mid-range, between the Hawaii based 390 series and the Pitcairn based 370 series.

This makes R9 380X a reasonable step up from the R9 380, though on the whole it’s unremarkable. Priced at $229, the card is about $30 more expensive than the 4GB R9 380 (and the 4GB GTX 960), which means it’s not pushing the price/performance curve in any way, though in all fairness to AMD they never said it would. Instead what we’re looking at is a small but logical stepping stone between the R9 380 and the R9 390, where similar to factory overclocked cards if you spend a bit more money you get a bit more performance. The end result is that for AMD’s stack the R9 380X is their best 1080p gaming card, almost never having to compromise on quality in order to get playable framerates.

Meanwhile looking at the competition, by virtue of the GPU configurations AMD and NVIDIA went with for this generation, the R9 380X has no true competitor from NVIDIA. This doesn’t give AMD much freedom – the card is only 10% faster than the GTX 960, so they have to stay within reason on pricing – but it means that they’re the only game in town for a $200-$250 video card family. Otherwise the one tradeoff here (as has been the case with most of AMD’s cards this year) will be on power efficiency; R9 380X doesn’t improve on AMD’s efficiency at all, resulting in R9 380X drawing a lot more power for its 10% advantage over GTX 960. We will add however that a 10% gap means that the R9 380X’s performance isn’t outside the potential reach of factory overclocked GTX 960 cards, but that is very much on a case-by-case basis as opposed to today’s look at baseline performance for each video card series.

The challenge to the R9 380X then doesn’t come from below, but from above. The R9 390 and GTX 970 start at $289 – $60 more than the R9 380X – and each is a rather sizable 40%+ faster than the R9 380X. Consequently both are value spoilers, offering that 40% better performance for a 26% higher price; a significantly higher cost for even more significant performance. At the end of the day budgets exist for a reason and the R9 380X is a reasonable offering in the product range it was designed for, but if you can afford to spend more for GTX 970 or R9 390 then right now that’s the better buy (with NVIDIA’s current game bundle as an extra kicker in favor of this).

Last but not least however we have the matter of the specific R9 380X card in today’s review, ASUS’s STRIX R9 380X OC. With the STRIX lineup ASUS has focused on quality and workmanship, and their STRIX R9 380X OC continues this legacy. It’s a well-built card – one of the best to have come our way all year – and it sets a very high bar for ASUS’s competition. The one drawback with the card is the price, and this goes hand-in-hand with the value spoiler effect we just covered. At $259 the STRIX R9 380X OC halves the premium for an R9 390/GTX 970, yet those cards are still 30%+ faster. It’s very hard to charge a premium price for a premium card in the current market, and while the STRIX R9 380X is a fantastic R9 380X, it’s none the less in a very awkward spot right below some very powerful video cards.

Overclocking
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  • godrilla - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link

    Newegg has the PowerColor r9 390 for $265.99 preblackfriday deal, for a bit more you get 20% more performance and double the vram!
  • r3loaded - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    Good to see my 7970 is still holding up very well even after almost four years!
  • Enterprise24 - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    7970 from 2011 can still compete with 380X in 2015.
  • CiccioB - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    Even the GTX480 can compete with GTX750Ti... something to be proud of, isn't it?
  • evilspoons - Tuesday, November 24, 2015 - link

    Ah, I'm still undecided what to do with respect to replacing my SLI GTX 680s. I'm in Canada so we're getting murdered by the exchange rate (GTX 970 is $380-$450, R9 390 is $450, the first R9 380X cards are $330...).

    Guess I'll just hold on to my 680s a while longer.
  • Mugur - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    I don't think that 380x is a bad card, by any means. It just needs to replace 380 4GB in that price slot and/or the OEMs to bin 380 with only 2 GB of RAM and let the 4G only for 380x. Currently, although understandable for the "novelty" factor, I saw in my country the Asus 380x Strix OC with the same price that some (discounted or not) GTX 970 or R9 390 cards (including an Asus Strix 970 OC :-) ) which is hilarious. Also with like 50% more than a Sapphire Nitro 380 4GB that I bought on Black Friday. Or AMD could simply replace 380 with 380x if the yields are good enough...
  • SolMiester - Wednesday, November 25, 2015 - link

    LOL, bit late to the party isnt it, anyone buying mid range has probably already purchased this generation...
  • aria - Monday, November 30, 2015 - link

    I'm not sure I agree. I'm still rocking an HD 7750 (perhaps "wheeling," as in "wheelchair" might be more appropriate at this point). It was mid-tier when I got it, but now it's not really sufficient. I'd like to play games at 1920x1080, but i don't really care; 1360x768 is good enough for me. But my current card can't even deliver that at 60 fps any longer (I actually think the card has deteriorated, because I played Dragon Age Inquisition last year on decent settings, and now I can't run it at 15 fps on Low and 1024x768). Anyway, most people using mid-tier I imagine are more like me. We don't purchase an upgrade as soon as one is available--we want to get the highest mid-tier we can, which involves waiting. If I'd replaced my 7750 two months ago, today I would have an inferior mid-tier card, which certainly will become important a year from now when I'm trying to get just a bit more performance out of it. 10% doesn't matter today, but 18 months from now that 10% will mean the difference between playable and unplayable. The rules of high end gaming aren't applicable at the mid-tier range, because we don't buy an upgrade simply because it's an upgrade.
  • HollyDOL - Thursday, November 26, 2015 - link

    Another proof graphics industry badly needs new manufacturing process. Possibilities of what can be achieved at 28nm (GPU wise) seem to be exhausted. It will get interesting with new process + HBM2, until then it's going to be a stall water.
  • lazymangaka - Tuesday, December 1, 2015 - link

    Unless someone was able to snag the 380X at a significant discount, I would have trouble justifying not spending the extra money to jump to the 390. That really looks like it would be $60 well spent.

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