AMD Radeon R9 380X Nitro Launch Review
Features & Overview
The “Nitro” moniker indicates that Sapphire is doing something different with this card's cooling solution. At first glance, everything looks consistent with the new generation of Nitro-branded cards.
Let’s first turn the card all the way around and take a look at its backplate. It’s a sight to see: Sapphire forgoes any and all openings and vents, but noticeably indents certain areas of the plate above the voltage converters. You'll need to remove it if you want to know what's behind those sections.
With the plate set aside, we’re greeted by a sight for sore eyes: there are finally thermal pads between the backplate and the sections of PCB where the voltage regulation circuitry's pins exit. If and how this makes a difference in cooling performance remains to be seen.
The two 10cm fans are made by Apistek. They max out at 2500 RPM, and under a full load, we measure six watts of overall power consumption between them.
Fortunately, Sapphire uses a massive copper heat sink and forgoes the cut-down heat pipes (DHT) and aluminum body. The efficient sink dissipates thermal energy evenly through the four 6mm heat pipes, which take it to the horizontally-oriented cooling fins.
The voltage converters and memory modules don't make contact with the heat sink, but are linked directly to the cooler’s body with the help of surfaces specifically designed for this purpose and thermal pads.
On the other side of the PCA, we find the five-phase VRM on the left. This needs to provide up to 250W during our stress test. In stark contrast, the phase for the memory (at the right-bottom) runs mostly idle with its maximum 5W.
By the way, Sapphire utilizes much better coils than its corporate parent PC Partner uses on the Radeon Fury X and Nano. Overall, the voltage conversion design is excellent.
The heat pipes can be seen on the bottom. Their positioning allows the graphics card to stay relatively flat and its height isn’t increased unnecessarily.
On the top, the only interesting features are the dual six-pin PCIe power connectors. The board is recessed right next to them, which gives away that these connectors are turned by 180 degrees. This should come in handy when installing the card, and it'll give the cooler some additional space to boot.
Last but not least is the back of the card. Sapphire does manage to avoid blowing waste heat directly onto the motherboard by implementing horizontally-oriented cooling fins. That also means some hot air can exit the case through openings in the back, next to the connectors (though much of it recirculates into your chassis, which we don't care for).
The second DVI port could (and should) have been a DisplayPort connector instead. You do get one full-sized DP interface though, along with HDMI 1.2a output.
so why did they retire tahiti 7970/280x for this? 3 generations of gpus with the same rough number scheme and same performance is sorta sad.
I know, this are my fingers and my wedding ring. :P
Call it a unique watermark.
With my 2560*1080 (to be fair, 33% more pixels) panel and a 970, I can almost never pull off ultimate graphic settings out of modern games, with the Witcher 3 only averaging about 35fps while at medium-high according to GeForce Experience.
If this is already the case, give it a year or two. Future proofing does not mean you should need to consider sli after only 6 months and a minor display upgrade.
Yeah, I definitely think that the 980 ti, Titan X, FuryX, and Fury Nano are the first cards that adequately exceed 1080p. No cards before those really allow the user to forget about graphics bottlenecks at a higher standard resolution. But even with those, 1440p is about the most you can do when your standards are that high. I consider my 780 ti almost perfect for 1080p, though it does bottleneck here and there in 1080p games. Using 4K without graphics bottlenecks is a lot further out than people realize.
The games we have today also happen to be the first games that pushed cards like the 7970 and the 680 to no longer be adequate for 1440p, let alone 1080p with settings maxed out. It's a pointless chicken and the egg argument.
I fail to see how lower power consumption, new features, higher memory capacity, and lower prices (both to manufacture and for us to buy) are sad. It isn't as if the 380X is now the high end. It is just a mid-ranged card that is replacing a formerly high-end card. This happens every graphics card generation. GTX 960 and GTX 580, Radeon 7850 and Radeon 5870, the list goes on and on. Furthermore, the 380X has a considerable performance advantage over the 7970 despite having the same core count because core count is far from everything and many other things changed from Tahiti to Tonga/Antigua. The 380X is easily about 20% faster than the 7970.
That's probably true to a certain extent, but I'm not sure I entirely agree. You'll be able to run today's most demanding games, and future games, with max setting at low resolutions on current- and past-gen cards. If you take the chicken and egg idea to its logical end, then there would eventually be a game that not even the most powerful card could not run at even at the lowest resolution possible. But that's not what happens. With a good CPU, there are cards that will be able to run anything at (for example) 640x480, no matter what settings, and no matter which game.
There's just an upper limit to processing requirements based on resolution and a target frame rate. Games don't usually reach that upper limit, but there is one. Ray tracing might be the best real-world approximation of demanding the most out of a certain resolution and frame rate. Whatever that limit is, though, there will be a card that can handle it for lower resolutions. If that weren't true, then someone would be able to build a color switching app for one (1) pixel, a resolution of 1x1, that could bring down the Titan X to less than 60 fps at all times. I don't think that would be possible with proper coding applied.
That plays out in the real world by certain cards being able to handle any game, at any setting, at a certain resolution while maintaining a targeted frame rate. I'd bet $1,000 that a resolution of 16x9 would be incapable of bringing the frame rate below 60 fps for any game to exist in the foreseeable future using a flagship graphics card (setting aside incompatibilities and non-graphics bottlenecks).
I could be totally wrong about there being an upper limit on processing requirements within a bound resolution and minimum frame rate, and I'm open to being shown why that upper limit theory isn't true. But I'm inclined to think it's true until I see exactly where I'm off.
Go back a few years, say to when the 7970 GHz edition launched so we have pretty much all of that generation's cards out and most driver kinks were worked out on both sides. The 7970 cards and the 680 were capable of running pretty much all games in 1440p in ultra and the 7850/650 Ti Boost could run pretty much all games in 1080p in ultra, all assuming there wasn't another bottleneck (such as a weak CPU).
So, the current high end cards were not the first cards to be adequate for 1440p, let alone 1080p. Today's top end cards are merely the first to be able to run today's most intensive games in their heavier settings at 1080p and 1440p. This isn't just true to some extent because the older reviews prove it (have a look at some Radeon 7970 GHz Edition reviews for a good lineup). This is what I meant by chicken and the egg. Current top-end cards don't let you "forget about graphics bottlenecks at a higher standard resolution [1440p]," anymore than top end cards from previous generations did with corresponding games.
I don't see how low resolutions, settings, and any performance limits related to them and CPUs are relevant to this.
Anything with a resolution of one pixel might be useless for this topic. I don't think things like tessellation, AA, AF, and so on can be performed on a resolution of one pixel. In that case, yes, there might be a limit to how much performance can be necessary before it becomes arbitrary, but I say that out of not knowing what modern features can really do with only one pixel. With a real resolution, let's use a low one like 640x480, you can always apply more and more settings, filters, etc. until you bog down even Titan X. Whether or not a game happens to support applying enough of these to such a resolution is another matter, but it can be done if some dev wanted to make such a program. The real limit is at what point you're throwing more and more resources at the problem without a discernible improvement in visual quality. For example, we could make a game that runs at 640x480 with 1024x MSAA or something like that, but why bother when you won't see any benefit from a minuscule fraction of that?
With the 680 being talked about in the past tense so soon, I wonder if I didn't even underestimate how long my 970 will last.
Anybody here think that dx12 and other such software improvements will help keep these cards relevant? Or are we still looking at a ~3 year upgrade cycle to just run games at decent settings, even with mostly top-of-the-line hardware today?
Sure, you can compare it to the fact that the 380 cost about what $230 or so when it was released, but the 380 has been around a good deal of time and the prices have dropped significantly.
Also, why on earth are they using a Powercolor 390 and an MSI 970 rather than using the MSI 390?
Walt Prill
More to the point of this post- you say that 380x uses virtualy the same idle power with two monitors, while TPU says its typical AMD crapscore of what it used to be- 3-4x more than it should and than you say it is. Did they make a mistake or did you?
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_380X_Strix/21.html
Also, while here why don't you still mention how poorly AMD video viewing power draw is? Along with the multi monitor power draw, video playback has been a huge negative on AMD for the past 3 years- ever since nvidia decided to fix it in 2012 on all their dx11 GPUs via drivers...