AMD Radeon R9 380X Review: The Full Tonga

The new Radeon R9 380X fills up the spot between the R9 380 and the R9 390X. Featuring a full unlocked “Tonga” GCN 1.2 architecture, the R9 380X (officially “Antigua”) is designed to hit the over $199 but under $299 sweet spot to go against NVIDIA’s GTX 960. Like other 300 series video cards, the R9 380X uses GDDR5 memory instead of HBM (which is currently reserved for the high-end R9 Fury parts), 4GB of it in fact running at 5.7Gbps with a stock core clock of 970MHz. This is powered with a pair of 6-pin power aside from the power draw directly from the PCI-E slot. Most of the features remain the same as the other 300 series as this is just a reconfiguration of the architecture everybody has been familiar with so it is not a thoroughly exciting card on that regard. What this card is for however, is for AMD to maximize the existing Tonga parts (initially seen in the R9 285, you can read my review of the PowerColor version here for comparison: http://www.modders-inc.com/powercolor-r9-285-2gb-turbo-duo-review/) for optimal 1440p performance.

Radeon	R9 Fury X	R9 Nano	R9 390X	R9 380X	R9 370
Fabrication Process	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm	28nm
GPU	Fiji	Fiji	Hawaii / Grenada	Antigua	Tobago
Streaming Processors	4096	4096	2816	2048	1024
Graphics memory	4 GB HBM	4 GB HBM	8 GB GDDR5	4GB GDDR5	2/4GB GDDR5
Memory Clock	up-to 500 MHz / 1.0 Gbps	up-to 500 MHz / 1.0 Gbps	6.0 Gbps	5.7 Gbps	5.6 Gbps
Core Clock	1050 MHz	up-to 1000 MHz	1050 MHz	970 MHz	975 MHz
Memory Bandwidth	up-to 512 GB/s	up-to 512 GB/s	384 GB/s	182 GB/s	179 GB/s
Power Connectors	2 x 8-pin	1 x 8-pin	1 x 6-pin – 1 x 8-pin	2 x 6-pin	1 x 6-pin
Form Factor	Dual slot	Dual slot	Dual slot	Dual slot	Dual slot
Freesync	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
DirectX 12 Support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Radeon AIB partners had free reign to customize on launch day with some opting for beefier VRM and pretty much all of them opting for superior twin-fan, multi-heatpipe cooling versus the reference 80mm blower style design that exhaust to the rear. Power envelope is at 190W but as with other 300-series video cards, there is always room for further overclocks on top of what manufacturers already clock beyond stock out of the box. Below are the current available R9 380X releases on launch day. MSI and Gigabyte R9 380X video cards are not listed yet on their website as of 12:00PM EST of November 19th but leaked images of those cards showed up last week so they will eventually turn up.

Manufacturer	Product Name	Core Clock (MHz)	Memory Clock (MHz)	Cooling	Price (USD)
AMD	Stock R9 380X	970	1425	1x fan (rear exhaust blower)	229
ASUS	R9 380X Strix	1010 (OC Mode)	1425	2x fan, 2x 10mm heatpipe	239
Gigabyte	—	—	—	—	—
MSI	—	—	—	—	—
PowerColor	R9 380X	1020	1475	2x fan, 3x heatpipes	239
Sapphire	R9 380X	1	1500	2x fan, 4x heatpipes	239
XFX	R9 380X XXX OC	990	1425	2x fan, 4x heatpipes	—
XFX	R9 380X DD Black Edition OC	1030	1450	2x fan, 4x heatpipes	—