The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX
by Ryan Smith on November 23, 2015 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Asus
- Radeon 300
The Test
For the review of the R9 380X we’ve had to make a few accommodations to our GPU testing protocol since our last major video card review, which we'd like to note.
Civilization: Beyond Earth has been deprecated, as the Rising Tide update has removed the built-in “lategameview” benchmark. Meanwhile AMD’s launch drivers for the R9 380X, Catalyst 15.11.1 Beta, are unfortunately not as solid as we’d like to see, as they have a repeatable issue with Far Cry 4 that causes it to crash with various AMD cards, including the R9 380X. As a result we’re unable to benchmark Far Cry 4 on the 380X at this time. Finally, we’re also unable to include compute benchmarks for R9 380X at reference clocks, as AMD’s drivers do not honor underclocking options with OpenCL programs.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon R9 380X AMD Radeon R9 380 AMD Radeon R7 370 AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7850 ASUS STRIX R9 380X NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 (2GB) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 358.50 Beta AMD Catalyst Cat 15.11.1 Beta |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
101 Comments
View All Comments
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The power demands on the CPU are much more significant under a game than under FurMark.Also, that specific GTX 960 is an EVGA model with a ton of thermal/power headroom. So it's nowhere close to being TDP limited under Crysis.
Edit: My apologies to one of our posters. It looks like I managed to delete your post instead of replying to it...
The True Morbus - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
So after all this time, this graphics card has the same performance as the now 2 years old GTX760?Right... I'm beginning to think the 760 was the best purchase of my life.
RussianSensation - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Same performance? You may need to re-check benchmarks across the web. R9 380X is more than 40% faster than a GTX760 2GB. TPU has it 43% faster at 1080P and 45% faster at 1440P:http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_St...
If you only have a 2GB version of the 760, you are also reducing texture quality in many games like Titanfall, Shadow of Mordor and have choppiness in Watch Dogs, AC Unity, Black Ops 3, and simply cannot even enable highest textures in some games like Wolfenstein NWO.
R9 380X isn't anything special when we've seen GTX970/290/290X/390 for $250-270 but it beats your card easily by 35-40%.
Laststop311 - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380x was a pointless launch. 50 dollars less you can just get the 380 which is only 10% slower. Or 50 more dollars and just get the 390 which blows the 380x away. This card targets a very narrow range and wasn't really needed imo.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
I believe the difference in Shadow of Mordor between the 7970 and the 380x at 1080p may only be clockspeed and not a difference from Tahiti or Tonga!silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The 380X may come with extra features over the 7970, however has TrueAudio ever truly been tested? Its addition was to help reduce CPU usage and it would be a shame if it went unused in favour of the motherboard sound.silverblue - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
Slight correction, it was to provide better effects, though I imagined that it would help a little with CPU usage anyway.Makaveli - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The only difference between them that counts is GCN 1.0 vs 1.2 TrueAudio has to be supported by the game and modor doesn't support it.Cryio - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
You guys REALLY need to switch to a Skylake i7 4.5 GHz with DDR4 3000+ system for benching GPUs.That Ivy 4.2 GHz is certainly holding back AMD GPUs, core parking issues, not as fancy drivers and all.
Ryan Smith - Monday, November 23, 2015 - link
The GPU testbed is due for a refresh. We'll be upgrading to Broadwell-E in 2016 once that's available.