ASUS Strix R9 380X Review

tinytomlogan

The Guvnor
Staff member
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The latest model in the AMD Radeon range is upon us, and we take a look at how it performs.


ASUS Strix R9 380X Review
 
What the what?!?!
That thing must be the teenager of the AMD group, it's all over the place!
That has got to be the most confusing set of results ever, especially beating a 980 in one test???
 
What the what?!?!
That thing must be the teenager of the AMD group, it's all over the place!
That has got to be the most confusing set of results ever, especially beating a 980 in one test???

Something is definitely wrong here in these tests. Every other review site consistently shows this card dominating the 960(it's closest Nvidia compeition) and every other card under the 390/970. It's the king of hill as far as it's price segment goes. Also all the reviews i have read aren't using the Strix(from what I have seen so far) and have had pretty good results in OC'ing hitting at least 1110/1600. This could suggest a bad Strix card OC3D received which would point towards the outlier results. It could also be a bad driver install but that wouldn't explain the OC'ing results so I'm thinking this is a bad card. But I would agree with you that these results surprised me too after reading other reviews.
 
Something is definitely wrong here in these tests. Every other review site consistently shows this card dominating the 960(it's closest Nvidia compeition) and every other card under the 390/970. It's the king of hill as far as it's price segment goes. Also all the reviews i have read aren't using the Strix(from what I have seen so far) and have had pretty good results in OC'ing hitting at least 1110/1600. This could suggest a bad Strix card OC3D received which would point towards the outlier results. It could also be a bad driver install but that wouldn't explain the OC'ing results so I'm thinking this is a bad card. But I would agree with you that these results surprised me too after reading other reviews.

We review what we get. 1110 isnt that much more than the stock clock we got and Id seriously think twice about benching it all again. I can assure though that their were no anomalies with our testing and we have reported it exactly how we should have.

Can only polish a rebrand so much matey. Meh card is meh. /end.
 
We review what we get. 1110 isnt that much more than the stock clock we got and Id seriously think twice about benching it all again. I can assure though that their were no anomalies with our testing and we have reported it exactly how we should have.

Can only polish a rebrand so much matey. Meh card is meh. /end.

This isn't a rebrand and calling it that is wrong. The previous 280x wasn't even using the same GCN architecture. There are a lot of underhood improvements between them and is why other reviews show this being faster than any other amd card that has 2048 cores but different GCN architectures. In addition to that it has more TMUs in comparison, It also consumes less power(from 30-50 watts depending on where you look) because it's more efficient just to top it off that its not a rebrand. You should know all this technical stuff dude.

Oh and in overclocking, 1110 was a conservative avg. I've seen some hit nearly 1150 and then over 6500 on the memory. All of them Nitro cards. I just think Asus again has made a bad amd card. Alternatively Sapphire could just be getting the best cores atm but seeing as how cool and quiet they are in comparison, it's up for debate on quality between the two. Imo sapphire just have the better card but I'm hoping XFX and MSI reviews are also as good as the Nitro has been.

I'm not saying you are lieing in the review but just in comparison to every other review yours is the only outlier result. It's just weird and strange is all
 
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Its not a bad card at all, its more than capable. The core at the heart isnt all that when tested how we do
 
Its not a bad card at all, its more than capable. The core at the heart isnt all that when tested how we do

Yeah as your results show. It's just strange that it's so much different than everyone else's benches which makes you wonder why it is that way. I mean most review sites are using W10 while you are on W7 still but I don't think that would make such a big difference, at most only a couple frames. That's the only thing I can think of. For the money though, it's probably the best bang for the buck before you hit the high end market starting wuth the 390 and 970.

One thing I would agree with you though as you said in the review is that it is NOT a 1440p card. It's an ultra 1080p card but at 1440p it's more of a medium no AA card tbh. No idea why AMD markets it that way, anyone could have told you that without testing it.
 
Yeah as your results show. It's just strange that it's so much different than everyone else's benches which makes you wonder why it is that way. I mean most review sites are using W10 while you are on W7 still but I don't think that would make such a big difference, at most only a couple frames. That's the only thing I can think of. For the money though, it's probably the best bang for the buck before you hit the high end market starting wuth the 390 and 970.

One thing I would agree with you though as you said in the review is that it is NOT a 1440p card. It's an ultra 1080p card but at 1440p it's more of a medium no AA card tbh. No idea why AMD markets it that way, anyone could have told you that without testing it.

Because we max our games out dude. The point is all of the GPU's are tested in the exact same way. You cant compare one review to another like for like.
 
Yeah as your results show. It's just strange that it's so much different than everyone else's benches which makes you wonder why it is that way. I mean most review sites are using W10 while you are on W7 still but I don't think that would make such a big difference, at most only a couple frames. That's the only thing I can think of. For the money though, it's probably the best bang for the buck before you hit the high end market starting wuth the 390 and 970.

One thing I would agree with you though as you said in the review is that it is NOT a 1440p card. It's an ultra 1080p card but at 1440p it's more of a medium no AA card tbh. No idea why AMD markets it that way, anyone could have told you that without testing it.
Just because others have moved to Windows 10 means nothing, especially when it comes to benching, if you take Valley, Heaven or Cinebench which while they run under Windows 10, don't actually register the OS correctly, on the other hand as Tom has pointed out the OC3D GPU test rig remains a set spec (OS included) all games are run at the same settings to give accurate scores across the board for all cards.

Any reviewers that change their environment are just polluting the graphs and complicating comparisons, for now at least. So until Windows 10 gets native support from all benches and all cards are retested under the new environment it makes supreme sense to stay with Windows 7.
 
Because we max our games out dude. The point is all of the GPU's are tested in the exact same way. You cant compare one review to another like for like.

I understand that but other sites do all max as well. I know they aren't directly comparable but when you have multiple sites citing performance far different than one single one it's just interesting to see.

Just because others have moved to Windows 10 means nothing, especially when it comes to benching, if you take Valley, Heaven or Cinebench which while they run under Windows 10, don't actually register the OS correctly, on the other hand as Tom has pointed out the OC3D GPU test rig remains a set spec (OS included) all games are run at the same settings to give accurate scores across the board for all cards.

Any reviewers that change their environment are just polluting the graphs and complicating comparisons, for now at least. So until Windows 10 gets native support from all benches and all cards are retested under the new environment it makes supreme sense to stay with Windows 7.

I know it won't make a difference.. that was really the only thing i could think of considering most everything else was the same(excluding ssds/psus but that won't make a difference). As I said going from 7 to 10 only provides a couple of frame differences at most in my experience. I was just pointing out that OC3Ds reviews were much different than everyone else's by a long shot(and everyone else's were similar) and found it interesting. Not saying these aren't valid because they are.
 
We review what we get. 1110 isnt that much more than the stock clock we got and Id seriously think twice about benching it all again. I can assure though that their were no anomalies with our testing and we have reported it exactly how we should have.

Can only polish a rebrand so much matey. Meh card is meh. /end.

It is all down to the silicon lottery, you win some you lose some.:)

Because we max our games out dude. The point is all of the GPU's are tested in the exact same way. You cant compare one review to another like for like.

Maxing games does tend to make overclocking harder as the GPU is under full load for longer.

I understand that but other sites do all max as well. I know they aren't directly comparable but when you have multiple sites citing performance far different than one single one it's just interesting to see.

It is very rare that I see a review site use genuine max settings as the fps are too low. Max settings means using all the MSAA the game has for example, this does not happen too often.:)
 
Another AMD card that is at least £30 too expensive.

give it three months and they'll get the pricing right. the 280X ended up being an excellent card (especially if you overclocked them) but they didn't get the pricing right for 3-4 months.
 
It really needs to be cheaper than the 960 to stop people buying the 960. though.

IE - to get people off Nvidia AMD really need to offer superb bargains, like they have with the 390 lately.

Too many people are deluded about PhysX and so on.
 
Too many people are deluded about PhysX and so on.
Ain't that the truth. Dumb PhysX and Gameworks. So many people see them as selling points only to end up having to turn the damn thing off anyway because it annihilates framerate on everything. I think that unless you're buying the absolute highest-end card from Nvidia, you're better off with AMD because of the price/performance ratio. Only the highest-end Nvidia cards make sense.
 
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