Asus STRIX R9 380X OC review

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Asus STRIX R9 380X OC
Asus STRIX R9 380X OC

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In terms of performance the Asus R9 380X is a pretty impressive little card. It's nearest Nvidia rival is the GTX 960, which is the same price as the straight R9 380. And when it comes to gaming the latest AMD midrange card manages an often healthy performance lead.

AMD is pegging the R9 380X as its 1440p card. In fact it's also putting the weaker R9 380 forward as such, but where that card struggles a little more at the 2560 x 1440 resolution, the R9 380X is still able to more or less stand its ground, if only just. The standard 2GB framebuffer in the GTX 960, however, starts to highlight the extra benefit of having 4GB of video memory strapped to your GPU these days.

Asus STRIX R9 380X OC side

4GB of video memory definitely makes a difference

The higher resolution textures of games like Shadow of Mordor or GTA V mean that, with only 2GB of capacity, the GTX 960 runs out of space very quickly. Then your gaming PC has to start accessing the slower system memory instead, introducing a drop in frame rate.

The average frame rate drop in Shadow of Mordor is obvious, less so in GTA V. Still, the difference is there around Los Santos too – the GTX 960 sometimes took as long as 167ms to draw a single frame, while the slowest the R9 380X hit was 90ms.

Asus STRIX R9 380X OC cooling

Asus has provided a very smart cooling solution, which is always good to see

Benchmarks

So without further ado, here are the results of our extensive benchmarking in full, directly comparing the card to GTX 960, GTX 970 and R9 390 opposition:

Synthetic tessellation performance (2560 x 1440)

Heaven 3.0 – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 26 (8)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 23 (11)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 38 (16)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 38 (15)

Gaming performance (2560 x 1440)

Battlefield 4 – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 36 (22)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 37 (23)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 58 (34)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 57 (34)

Total War: Attila – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 14 (9)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 11 (6)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 20 (13)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 19 (13)

GRID 2 – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 68 (53)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 59 (48)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 88 (70)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 96 (76)

GTA V – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 35 (11)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 31 (6)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 52 (15)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 49 (19)

Shadow of Mordor – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 40 (19)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 24 (14)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 56 (28)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 51 (38)

Gaming performance (1920 x 1080)

Battlefield 4 – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 57 (31)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 55 (31)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 82 (47)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 90 (47)

GTA V – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 51 (14)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 49 (9)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 74 (20)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 75 (21)

Shadow of Mordor – Avg (Min) FPS

  • Asus STRIX R9 380X: 56 (26)
  • Asus STRIX GTX 960: 36 (17)
  • Sapphire R9 390 Nitro: 79 (38)
  • Gigabyte GTX 970: 74 (50)
Dave James