Custom Cooling a Good Idea? (R9 380)

overclocking will certainly net you better framerates as long as you're not being bottlenecked by another component like the cpu. i've never tried a custom air cooler on a gpu like that, but you should not need it unless you're already fighting high temps or are going for some very extreme overclocks.

search the forums here for very helpful information on how to overclock. im sure you can get a respectable boost with the card just the way it is.

Is your card throttling ?.... If not adding a 3rd party cooler will have no impact on performance.; it may even make it worse as these 3rd party coolers do not address the VRM / Memory area and sometimes cool worse then the original cooler.

As the RX 3xx series was basicaly a RX 2xx series with a bigger factory OC, the OC headroom is quite small. Side by side, the AMD RX series cards have about 25% - 50% the overclocking headroom as comparable nVidia cards, with the smaller % at the top end.

RX390x was typically 6%
RX390 was typically 8%
RX380X was typically 10%

Try to overclock the card now and see if you reach a thermal limit before a stability limit. There is little risk in damaging the GPU.

It is almost always better to invest in a faster GPU rather than overclock. Selling your card, taking the money you were going to spend on the cooler, and maybe adding a little bit, and you might be able to pick up much larger increase than the one or two digit increases that overclocking can get you.

Eximo highlighted one of the main problems in on-line reviews. Some sites will do an OC test on one game and that is fairly reliable as fps scales evenly until something else steps into choke performance. But most sites only compare "out of the box" performance. This was not so bad a few years ago, but today is made more difficult by the fact that the two major players approach the issue differently.

The risk of pushing the overclock at the factory is that the % of cards that will be RMAd increases the more you push the OC due to the realities of the silicon lottery. Starting with the 2xx series AMD began pushing the OC "in the box" whereas nVidia stayed rather conservative. What AMD did is good for consumers as they get a bit more performance in the box than they otherwise would have gotten and it is guaranteed.

The flip side is that when comparing two cards using reviews (THG for example) that don't examine this issue and rank cards w/o this consideration, is that you don't know how they stand up against one another the way you are going to use them. For arguments sake, let's say that the FuryX and 980 Ti have the exact same performance out of the box and the FuryX is $10 cheaper; was the FuryX the better buy ? What about when you overclock ... and the FuryX OCs 6% and the 980 Ti OCs 31% (and yes those are FPS increases not clock increases) . It's not that either series is inherently better, it's just that AMD cards have a much bigger factory OC "in the box" leaving less headroom.

This user reported thermal throttling on a Giga 380 at 74C w/ OCCT ... in another he tested w/ Furmark and it didn't throttle till 80C

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/3bqecn/r9_380_has_a_low_thermal_limit/

You will have to test yourself and see what you can do. As for his problems with different tests, I remember years back nVidia would detect OCCT and it would throttle immediately ... Furmark ran w/o issue tho ... maybe AMD incorporated something similar of other factors were involved.

Frankly I can't see spending $60 on a custom cooler mount and then another $80 or more on a CLC. You could buy another 380 for that price.