with the continuing trend of more capable gpus and higher resolution
monitors falling in price gaming at 1440p is becoming an attractive option
for people who want to go beyond the now standard 1080p experience but don't want
to Fork out tons of cash for a 4K setup
with that in mind today we're looking at AMD's new Radeon R9
380x an upper mid-range card squarely
focused on the 1440p market how does it
stack up to the competition in terms of performance and value stay tuned to find
out and if you guys like the video once you're done hit that like button
up Corsair's RMI series power supplies
feature premium components for great performance with very low noise click
the link in the video description to learn more let's start off by having a
look at the important specs of our three 80x like its slightly cheaper little
brother the R9 380 the 380x features a
tonga GPU but packs more stream processors for a performance boost you
also get a fairly standard allocation of 4 GB of gddr5 memory a 256bit memory
interface and at least a 970 MHz core
clock with support for direct X12 Vulcan
and mantle apis our review sample is a sapphire night retro Edition featuring a
70 MHz outof the Box overclock a dual fan open aired cooler and a plastic back
plate reference cards aren't available quite yet but you'll get a similar look
to other recent gen radon cards with a black shroud and blower style fan you'll
need two six pin PCI Express power connectors to give your card enough
juice to properly run as well for testing We compare the 380x to a number
of other mid-range to high-end is cards from an AMD to NVIDIA standpoint
excluding the gtx980 TI and the R9 Fury
series as those cards are priced well above the target market for the 380x we
used our standard test bench inside of a cooler master master case Pro 5 you can
see the specs of the test bench here on the screen so let's have a quick look at
the results our first test was to check the power draw and temperatures at load
the 380x performed about exactly where we expected it smack in the middle of
the AMD product stack at 2 88 Watts its
power draw is about 70 Watts higher than its closest competitor on the NVIDIA
side the GTX 960 but is still by no
means unreasonable the GPU stayed at a respectable 69° C so you shouldn't have
to worry too much about temperatures north of the 80° kind of Mark that we've
been having some issues with with the R9 290 and 390 series for our game
benchmarks we started off with the notoriously resource hungry Crisis 3
running at 1440 p on the very high preset with FXAA enabled here we saw the
380x push 34 frames per second beating
out its closest competitor the on the NVIDIA side the gtx960 by 6 FPS moving
on to Far Cry 4 at ultra settings at 1440p the 380x mustered 39 frames per
second beating out the GTX 960 by 4 FPS
and in Tomb Raider at the same resolution and ultimate settings we got
49 frames per second compared to the 40 from the 960 but while these frame rates
are certainly playable they may not be quite as smooth as you'd like so we put
the 380x through our suite of games again but this time turn the graphics
down to one step below the maximum here
we saw a pretty substantial Improvement especially in Tomb Raider and Crisis 3
with the 38x now pushing 75 and 54 FPS
respectively Far Cry 4 saw a more modest
yet still noticeable bump at 44 FPS but
just because this is a 1440p focus card doesn't mean that's what you have to use
it for if you're rocking a 1080p Monitor and want to say just max out your games
you can do so so we did and the 38x managed between about 53 and 70 FPS
overall but what about value the aforementioned performance gain over the
960 does come at a cost at the time of
this video the cheapest gtx960 on new egg cost $55 less than the cheapest 380x
due to to sales prices yes but you'd normally be looking at a closer to $25
to $30 Delta so does the 380x make sense
from a value for money perspective our Sapphire 38x is selling on New Egg for
$230 while you can pick up the same ASUS
strix GTX 960 that we used for 210
looking at the graph you can see a slight but not earth shattering
Advantage for the 3DX in terms of dollars per frame at 1440p which may
make the $20 premium a worthwhile
investment unfortunately we didn't have
an r9380 non-x to test against but
independent testing that we have seen has shown that the X edition only gives
you a boost of 2 to three FPS in many cases so the plain vanilla 380 may be a
better choice if you don't care about squeezing every last frame from your
wallet including every last dollar so
our conclusion is that while the 38x does doesn't change the game in the 200
to$ 250ish dollar price point it's still a
solid entry for AMD for those who want to game at 1440p with the settings
cranked to high or those who want to get close to that 60fps Holy Grail at 1080p
with everything cranked up if you really want to max out games at 1440p though
and approach 60 frames per second spending the extra 70 to 100 bucks on a
GTX 970 or R9 390 might have been a wise
decision if you have the extra cash upes
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so go to upes over at upd desk.com Linus
it's linked in the video description down below thanks for watching guys if
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here and look no further for part one of
the mineral oil build if you guys haven't seen that yet you probably have
but if you haven't it's awesome