R9 380 power supply requirements: AMD Radeon R9 380 Specs

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The AMD Radeon R9 380X ReviewMeet the ASUS STRIX R9 380X OCThe TestBattlefield 4Crysis 3Middle Earth: Shadow of MordorDragon Age: InquisitionThe Talos PrincipleTotal War: AttilaGRID AutosportGrand Theft Auto VSyntheticsPower, Temperature, & NoiseOverclockingFinal Words

As always, last but not least is our look at power, temperature, and noise. Next to price and performance of course, these are some of the most important aspects of a GPU, due in large part to the impact of noise. All things considered, a loud card is undesirable unless there’s a sufficiently good reason – or sufficiently good performance – to ignore the noise.

Unfortunately we don’t have any tools that can read the GPU voltage on the ASUS card, so we’ll jump right into average clockspeeds.

The ASUS R9 380X has no problem holding its full boost clockspeed in games, both at its stock speed of 1030MHz and when downclocked to 970MHz.

Starting with idle power consumption, the ASUS card comes in right where we’d expect it. 75-76W is typical for a Tonga card on our GPU testbed.

Moving on to power consumption under Crysis 3, like so many other aspects of R9 380X, its performance here is very close to the original R9 380. Power consumption is up slightly thanks to the additional CUs and the additional CPU load from the higher framerate, with the reference clocked R9 380X coming in at 299W, while ASUS’s factory overclock pushes that to 304W.

The problem for AMD is that this is smack-dab in GTX 970 territory. Meanwhile the GTX 960, though slightly slower, is drawing 74W less at the wall. R9 380 just wasn’t very competitive on power consumption compared to Maxwell, and R9 380X doesn’t do anything to change this. AMD’s power draw under games is essentially one class worse than NVIDIA’s – the R9 380X draws power like a GTX 970, but delivers performance only slightly ahead of a GTX 960.

The one bit of good news here for AMD is that while the power consumption of the R9 380X isn’t great, it’s still better balanced than the R9 390. With AMD opting to push the envelope there to maintain price/performance parity with the GTX 970, while the R9 380X is a fair bit slower than the R9 390, it saves a lot of power in the process. And for that matter the R9 380X shows a slight edge over the 7970, delivering similar gaming performance for around 16W less at the wall.

Moving over to FurMark our results get compressed by quite a bit (we’re using a GTX 960 with a fairly high power limit), but even then the R9 380X’s power consumption isn’t in AMD’s favor. At best we can say it’s between the GTX 960 and GTX 970, with the former offering performance not too far off for less power.

Otherwise as was the case with Crysis 3, the R9 380X holds a slight edge over the 7970 on power consumption. This despite the fact that the R9 380X uses AMD’s newer throttling technology, and consequently it gets closer to its true board limit than the 7970 ever did.

With idle temperatures ASUS’s 0db Fan technology doesn’t hamper the R9 380X at all. Even without any direct fan airflow the STRIX R9 380X holds at 30C.

Load temperatures also look good. ASUS’s sweet spot seems to be around 70C – right where we like to see it for an open air cooled card – with the R9 380X reaching equilibrium at 67C for Crysis 3 and 71C for FurMark.

Finally with idle noise, the zero fan speed idle technology on the STRIX lineup means that the STRIX R9 380X gets top marks here. At 36.4dB the only noise coming from our system is closed loop liquid cooler for the CPU. The video card is completely silent.

Shifting over to load noise levels then, the STRIX R9 380X continues to impress. With Crysis 3 the card tops out at 38.9dB – less then 3dB off of our noise floor – and that goes for both when the card is operating at AMD’s reference clocks and ASUS’s factory overclock. At this point the STRIX R9 380X is next-to-silent; it would be hard to do too much better without using an entirely passive cooling setup. So for ASUS to dissipate what we estimate to be 175W or so of heat while making this little noise is nothing short of impressive.

Meanwhile with FurMark the ASUS card needs to work a bit harder, but it still offers very good results. Even with the card maxed out we’re looking at just 41.4dB. The STRIX R9 380X isn’t silent, but it gets surprisingly close for such a powerful card.

Synthetics
Overclocking
The AMD Radeon R9 380X ReviewMeet the ASUS STRIX R9 380X OCThe TestBattlefield 4Crysis 3Middle Earth: Shadow of MordorDragon Age: InquisitionThe Talos PrincipleTotal War: AttilaGRID AutosportGrand Theft Auto VSyntheticsPower, Temperature, & NoiseOverclockingFinal Words

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AMD Radeon R9 380X Review: How to make the best graphics card for 1080p gaming?

With the introduction of the new Radeon R9 380X, AMD has filled a major gap in the graphics market between the «most 1080p gaming» Radeon R9 380 / GeForce GTX 960 (approximately $200) and the R9 390 / GTX 970, which are offered for $300 and are designed for resolutions of 1440 and above.

Previously, nVidia announced the 960 Ti in the GeForce 900 series, and AMD updated the entire Radeon family in one fell swoop in June, but there was no equivalent to the old Radeon R9 280X in the R9 300 series. In the all-important price range of «$200 to $300» the company didn’t have any offers, and gamers who wanted a modern graphics card that could handle 1080p well had to save up for $300+ products. Frankly, $300 is already out of the budget for most PC gamers. , and the capabilities of the GTX 970 and Radeon R9 390 for those who need only 60 frames per second at 1080p resolution are clearly overkill.

And here comes the AMD Radeon R9 380X, offered for $230. Yes, you read that right, not $250, but $230. That’s what healthy competition does.

Radeon R9 380X Technical Specifications

The Radeon R9 380X is not a cut down version of the R9 390, but rather an improved version of the R9 380: we see more stream processors and more memory here, memory acceleration and an increase in core clock speed, etc. If the R9380 graphics processor frequency is limited to 970 MHz, and the amount of expensive memory is 4 GB, then for the new board these characteristics have become only a starting point. The Radeon R9 380X is based on the Tonga GPU (first introduced in the old R9 285 board) with a new AMD architecture that supports all Radeon software features including FreeSync, Frame Rate Target Control, and Virtual Super Resolution.

The table above shows the main specifications of the R9 reference sample.380X, but you will not find such a board in stores. The first wave of R9 380X products will be introduced by AMD partners VisionTek, Asus, XFX, Gigabyte, HIS, PowerColor and VTX3D. The models they offer will have increased clock speeds and a dedicated cooling system, and prices will start at $240.

AMD sent us the Sapphire Nitro R9 380X board to write a review. Of course, its dual-fan cooling system is not as powerful as the triple-fan Nitro 39.0/390X, but is reasonably efficient and almost as quiet.

Without a doubt, Sapphire’s cooling system is one of the best on the market. The thermal control provided by it made it possible to increase the clock frequency of the processor core to 1,040 MHz, and the data exchange rate with the memory to 6 Gb / s. According to AMD, most 380X boards, like the Sapphire board, will be 50-60 MHz faster than the reference.

Sapphire Nitro R9 380X

The Sapphire Nitro R9 380X also has other design features: thick copper heat pipes, two ball bearing fans, Black Diamond chokes, a full-length horizontal fin heatsink, and a snazzy futuristic design. It is immediately clear that you have a reliable, expensive and uncompromising solution.

The board is equipped with DVI-D, DVI-I, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. The latter is absolutely necessary if you intend to use the FreeSync display, recommended when running games at 1440p and specifically designed for this niche. Power on R9The 380X is fed through two six-pin connectors and has a TDP of 190W.

AMD Radeon R9 380X Testing

To test the Sapphire Nitro R9 380X, we used a system that includes the following components:
• Intel Core i7-5960X processor with a closed loop Corsair Hydro Series h200i liquid cooling system, eliminating any delays from the CPU that could affect the results of execution graphic tests.
• Motherboard Asus X99 Deluxe.
• Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory, Obsidian 750D tower case with 1200 watt AX1200i power supply.
• 480 GB Intel 730 Series SSD.
• Windows 8.1 Pro operating system. We have decided to postpone the transition to Windows 10 until the availability of games that support DirectX 12.

If AMD positions its board as an entry-level solution for running games with a resolution of 2560 × 1440 pixels, then the inscription on the Sapphire Nitro R9 box380X notifies us that this is a high-end product for 1080p gaming. With that in mind, we compared the board to both cheaper 1080p models ($200 VisionTek R9 380, $200 EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC, $160 EVGA GeForce GTX 950 SSC) and more. expensive ones that get good results at 1440p (Sapphire Nitro R9 390 and EVGA GeForce GTX 970 FTW, which are priced at $300 and up).
Each game ran its built-in benchmark with default settings unless otherwise noted (V-Sync, G-Sync, FreeSync) and specialized features disabled (such as nVidia Multi-Frame-Sampled technology). anti-aliasing).
DirectX 12 tests have also appeared recently, but we decided not to use them, since they are not yet included in the finished products. There are currently no games that support DirectX 12 on the market, but it is expected that they will appear at the end of this year. Thus, despite all the theoretical advantages of DirectX 12, it is still too early to start practical testing of this technology.

Zeros on the diagrams mark the modes in which specific graphics cards were not tested.

Ready? Good. Then let’s get started.

The longer the bar, the better the result

The memory requirements of Grand Theft Auto V can be a bit of a problem for high-end boards, but the game scales well, and at 1080p or 1440p the load isn’t as intense. Since there are no preset modes (Medium or Ultra) here, we tested in various ways: with FXAA enabled and all other settings set to Normal at 1080p, with FXAA enabled and all others set to Very High at 1440p and with the same 1440p settings with 4x MSAA and Reflection MSAA enabled.

That GTAV favors nVidia boards is obvious to the naked eye. To put everyone on an equal footing, we ran our tests at Normal settings and 1080p resolution. However, the Radeon R9 380X allows you to set the vast majority of the parameters to High or Very High and at the same time maintain a constant frame rate of 60 frames per second. (We might start choosing higher settings in the future.) And without MSAA turned on, the R9 380X averaged over 50fps even at 1440p.

The longer the bar, the better the result

Our board also broke the 60fps barrier in the Dragon Age Inquisition test at High settings. At the same time, its performance was 5-10 frames higher than the results shown by $200 boards. The DAI Ultra mode should bring the quality and anti-aliasing parameters to the maximum level, but the frame rate drops so much that it is no longer possible to talk about enjoyment. However, at maximum settings and 1080p resolution, the Sapphire Nitro R9The 380X delivered a decent enough 44fps result. We saw the same at High settings at 1440p, which is well below the capabilities of the R9 390 and GTX 970.

The longer the bar, the better the result

Nvidia’s slogan «Enjoy the game the way it was meant to be» comes into full play in the early screens of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which are full of special effects, but our tests showed that the game favored Radeon cards more. Since not all parameters were set to maximum in Ultra mode, on boards that support 1440p resolution and have 4 GB of memory, we did this manually using the HD Ultra Texture Pack.

At 1080p/Ultra and 1440p/High, the Radeon R9 380X achieved the desired 60fps, beating the R9 380 and GTX 960 by 5-10fps. In High mode, at 1080p, the frame rate jumped to 90fps. A very responsive game.

The longer the bar, the better the result

Alien Isolation is terrifying yet delivers amazing performance. At 1080p/Ultra settings, even the $100 GTX 750 Ti board broke the 60fps barrier, and the Sapphire Nitro R9The 380X hit the 100 fps milestone. At 1440p, our board hit 71fps, well behind the R9 390 and GTX 970. Both outperformed the R9 380X by 20fps.

The longer the bar, the better the result

Sleeping Dogs: Definitive Edition is an improved version of the popular game. At Extreme settings, multi-pass anti-aliasing is performed here, which leads to a significant drop in frame rate. Therefore, it makes sense to focus on the High mode. As in all other tests at 1080p R9The 380X outperformed the $200 boards by a significant margin, and at 1440p was also hopelessly behind the $300 products.

The longer the bar, the better the result

Likewise, Metro: Last Light Redux is an improved version of the excellent, long-lasting Metro: Last Light. The R9 380X performed well here, although it dropped below the critical 60fps for a first-person shooter at 1440p/High settings. In 1080p/Ultra mode everything was fine.

The longer the bar, the better the result

All boards ran the synthetic but highly respected and frequently used 3DMark Fire Strike test in the industry.

The shorter the bar, the better the result

Everyone is already used to the fact that AMD motherboards consume more energy than Nvidia products, and the increased potential of the R9 380X compared to the GTX 960 resulted in an additional 100 watts of power consumption in our tests. Power consumption was measured by connecting to a Watts Up meter, after which the Furmark load test was run for 15 minutes. The results obtained can be considered as the worst case scenario. In most real R9 games380X consumes 270 to 300 watts.

The shorter the bar, the better the result

Considering the higher power consumption, the R9 380X is somewhat hotter than the R9 380 and GTX 960. The board gets even hotter than the $300 products, although these models come with a much larger heatsink and additional fan. In practice, the Sapphire cooling system works very efficiently, and during the game, as I mentioned earlier, the board is almost inaudible.

Conclusion

A recent review of the $200 VisionTek R9 380 board concluded: “ You get a great mainstream 1080p gaming product for the money. In most cases on Ultra settings, the frequency exceeds 60 frames per second, although sometimes it may be necessary to turn off the anti-aliasing options, and in some games, go to High settings — but only if the barrier of 60 frames per second is really critical for you. However, the frequency of the VisionTek Radeon R9380 never drops below the console level of 30fps, even with all the graphical enhancements enabled in ‘s most resource-hungry games.» An additional advantage of the AMD R9 380X product is an 8-15% increase in frame rate compared to its little brother. The increase is not too significant, but noticeable. The board breaks the 60fps barrier at High and Ultra settings, and 4GB of memory provides headroom for the future versus the 2GB baseline on the R9 models380 and GTX 960. The Sapphire cooling system works great. The expediency of switching to the R9 380X from the old Radeon 7850/7870 is beyond doubt, but the owners of the R9 280X have something to think about.

The R9 380X might be considered an entry-level solution for 1440p gaming, but you won’t get the desired 60fps on High settings on most games. And on newer and more demanding games (for example, Witcher 3), it can drop significantly lower. Perhaps, fans of games in this resolution will have a desire to buy a FreeSync monitor as well. But if you want real fun, you’d be better off spending the extra $50 on the R9.390 or GTX 970. These costs will pay off with interest, and the Sapphire Nitro R9 390 and EVGA GTX 970 FTW boards proved to be the best in the tests. At 1440p, they leave the R9 380X far behind.

An alternative option could be to purchase R9 290 boards that are currently in short supply, which are still found in online stores in some places. We’ve seen them for $200 — yes, yes, just $200 — and yet they deliver excellent performance, on par with the R9 380X, although slightly behind the newer R9s.390 and GTX 970.

Summing up, it is worth noting that the R9 380X has filled an important market niche. This is the best board for 1080p and 60fps — at least to date. It would be strange if NVIDIA didn’t respond to AMD’s outburst with the GTX 960 Ti, but it will be hard to compete with the R9 380X’s $230 price tag. While retail prices for the R9 380 boards are already down to $180, Nvidia is still offering the GTX 960 for $200 and up, and the price of the GTX 950 doesn’t go below $160. Today, nVidia is very limited in its maneuverability. It will either have to cut prices across the board or release a board that will perform better than the R9 380X and be offered at a higher price.

I want to repeat once again: healthy competition is a very useful thing. By refocusing the Radeon Technologies group, equipping the Fury family with high-performance memory, completely overhauling the software, and offering the best mainstream boards in the $200-$250 price range, AMD is poised to take on another round of nVidia in 2016. Although, of course, the Green Team will not sit idly by either.

• GPU frequency 70MHz higher?
  1040MHz vs 970MHz
• 0.78 TFLOPS above FLOPS?
  4.26 TFLOPS vs 3.48 TFLOPS
• 2.3 GPixel/s higher pixel rate?
  33.3 GPixel/s vs 31 GPixel/s
• 125MHz faster memory speed?
  1500MHz vs 1375MHz
• 2x more VRAM?
  4GB vs 2GB
• 500MHz higher effective clock speed?
  6000MHz vs 5500MHz
• 24. 1 GTexels/s higher number of textured pixels?
  133.1 GTexels/s vs 109 GTexels/s
• 16GB/s more memory bandwidth?
  192GB/s vs 176GB/s

Which comparisons are the most popular?

AMD Radeon R9 380

vs

AMD Radeon RX 570

Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

vs

Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti

AMD Radeon R9 380

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060

Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

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AMD Radeon RX 6600

AMD Radeon R9 380

vs

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650

0002 MSI Radeon RX 570 Armor

AMD Radeon R9 380

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MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC

Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

vs

Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060

AMD Radeon R9 380

vs

NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1050380X

vs

Sapphire Radeon HD 7970

AMD Radeon R9 380

vs

AMD Radeon RX 470

Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

vs

AMD Radeon RX 470

AMD Radeon R9 380

vs

Nvidia GeForce GTX 960

Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

vs

Gigabyte Radeon RX 6700 XT Eagle

AMD Radeon R9 380

90 GeForce002 905 Giga 1 vs

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Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380x

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performance

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, performance performance yet performance, performance yet performance GPU clock speed

970MHz

1040MHz

The graphics processing unit (GPU) has a higher clock speed.

Turbo GPU

Unknown. Help us offer a price. (AMD Radeon R9380)

Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X)

When the GPU is running below its limits, it can jump to a higher clock speed to increase performance.

pixel rate

31 GPixel/s

33.3 GPixel/s

The number of pixels that can be displayed on the screen every second.

flops

3.48 TFLOPS

4.26 TFLOPS

FLOPS is a measurement of GPU processing power.

texture size

109 GTexels/s

133.1 GTexels/s

Number of textured pixels that can be displayed on the screen every second.

GPU memory speed

1375MHz

1500MHz

Memory speed is one aspect that determines memory bandwidth.

Shading patterns

Shading units (or stream processors) are small processors in a graphics card that are responsible for processing various aspects of an image.

texture units (TMUs)

TMUs take texture units and map them to the geometric layout of the 3D scene. More TMUs generally means texture information is processed faster.

ROPs

ROPs are responsible for some of the final steps of the rendering process, such as writing the final pixel data to memory and for performing other tasks such as anti-aliasing to improve the appearance of graphics.

Memory

effective memory speed

5500MHz

6000MHz

The effective memory clock is calculated from the size and data transfer rate of the memory. A higher clock speed can give better performance in games and other applications.

maximum memory bandwidth

176GB/s

192GB/s

This is the maximum rate at which data can be read from or stored in memory.

VRAM (video RAM) is the dedicated memory of the graphics card. More VRAM usually allows you to run games at higher settings, especially for things like texture resolution.

memory bus width

256bit

256bit

A wider memory bus means it can carry more data per cycle. This is an important factor in memory performance, and therefore the overall performance of the graphics card.

GDDR version

Later versions of GDDR memory offer improvements such as higher data transfer rates, which improve performance.

Supports memory troubleshooting code

✖AMD Radeon R9 380

✖Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

Memory troubleshooting code can detect and repair data corruption. It is used when necessary to avoid distortion, such as in scientific computing or when starting a server.

Functions

DirectX version

DirectX is used in games with a new version that supports better graphics.

OpenGL version

The newer the OpenGL version, the better graphics quality in games.

OpenCL version

Some applications use OpenCL to use the power of the graphics processing unit (GPU) for non-graphical computing. Newer versions are more functional and better quality.

Supports multi-monitor technology

✔AMD Radeon R9 380

✖Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

The video card has the ability to connect multiple screens. This allows you to set up multiple monitors at the same time to create a more immersive gaming experience, such as a wider field of view.

GPU boot temperature

Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X)

Lower boot temperature means the card generates less heat and the cooling system works better.

supports ray tracing

✖AMD Radeon R9 380

✖Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

Ray tracing is an advanced light rendering technique that provides more realistic lighting, shadows and reflections in games.

Supports 3D

✔AMD Radeon R9 380

✔Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

Allows you to view in 3D (if you have a 3D screen and glasses).

supports DLSS

✖AMD Radeon R9 380

✖Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI based scaling technology. This allows the graphics card to render games at lower resolutions and upscale them to higher resolutions with near-native visual quality and improved performance. DLSS is only available in some games.

PassMark (G3D) result

Unknown. Help us offer a price. (Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9380X)

This test measures the graphics performance of a graphics card. Source: Pass Mark.

Ports

has HDMI output

✔AMD Radeon R9 380

✔Sapphire Nitro Radeon R9 380X

Devices with HDMI or mini-HDMI ports can stream HD video and audio to an attached display.

HDMI connectors

Unknown. Help us offer a price. (AMD Radeon R9 380)

More HDMI connectors allow you to connect multiple devices such as game consoles and TVs at the same time.