AMD R9 380X Review – ASUS Strix 380X OC

Today AMD is releasing the R9 380X, a full-fledged GCN 1.2 Tonga chip. The newest member of AMD's GCN stable is meant to take care of the upper mid-range, a segment of the market that can generally be served with cards just above or just below this price point, and with custom editions that offer factory overclocking that make them cross competitive above their line anyway, so AMD's introduction of the 380X is interesting.

It might not seem as if that segment is that important, being that there are plenty of R7 370's, and even R9 380's that cover this price range already from AIB's. But really it's all about giving consumers more choice when shopping for the right GPU for their rig. It's also obviously a business decision designed to take advantage of what are likely better yields of Tonga so that they may sell more and make more. But, regardless of the obvious, more choice for consumers is always a good thing even though it may seem to be a saturated market.

The direct competition in this price point is still the GTX 960, which also comes in many different 2GB and 4GB variants that have their 1024 CUDA cores clocked at rates that can make them good values for the money, depending on the overall goal of the system. There are some very obvious differences that set a full Tonga apart from the equivalent Maxwell from NVIDIA. With AMD, there's a larger memory bus, a standard configuration of 4GB of VRAM and it's red.

The R9 380X is a fully enabled Tonga, the first of it's kind on in the desktop space outside of mobile, and of course the iMac. This means that there are a full 32 compute units, 2048 stream processors running at 970MHz and 4GB of GDDR5 RAM clocked at up to 1425MHz, depending on what the board partners decide to do with it.