Synthetic Benchmarks
3D Mark
Picking a comparison group was slightly confusing. The pair cost under £400, yet the performance tops cards that are £500+ (GTX 980Ti). Generally I would only choose single/dual card options that are a similar price.
Thrown at 3DMark, I was surprised to see the 380X duo topping the overall single card chart, even toppling the GTX 980Ti for at least £100 less. The overall score is weaker than the GTX 980Ti and R9 Fury X due to the weaker GPU cores.
At 1440p, the duo still holds the top spot, but at the scores presented, it suggests 1440p would be the limit for these cards.
As predicted, 4K is too much for these cards despite the strong 1080p and 1440p performance. Typically a score of 5,500 on both Score and Graphics would suggest good performance for that particular resolution.
Unigine Valley
Unigine Valley is a good show of overall performance even though it’s not a playable game. Like in the Fire Strike Ultra benchmark, the 380X duo comes up just short of the two powerhouse cards.
Moving up to 4K and the cards lose all grunt with the R9 390X just nipping the 3rd place.
Compute Performance
Luxmark shows that these cards together offer higher OpenCL computer performance than all of the cards in our sample testing.
This is amazing. It costs less than half what a GTX980 costs, beats it horribly in crossfire, and even competes with the GTX980Ti and Fury X both $650. Two R9 380Xs are less than $500. For those users that just want a machine that can do 1080P max settings and a 4K TV you could run most games at 1080P for the monitor and max out the most demanding games at 1440P on your TV. Your framerate would be almost perfect even at max
cant wait to crossfire mine for 4k battlefield 4 sickkkk had to look at this again loll
There are a lot of advantages to this GPU compared to the competition. For starters power consumption is completely reasonable. A 500w total system power draw in a mid to high end crossfire system is great especially when running Furmark. Then you have the larger memory capacity and bandwidth which are serious advantages to have in VR gaming which show over 100% gains when in crossfire systems. Everything Nvidia offers in this price range has gimped memory bandwidth.
The R9 380X is held to higher quality standards than the R9 380 and R9 390. The fully enabled Tonga chips were meant for expensive iMacs and gaming laptops. That means these chips were originally binned to sustain higher clock speeds at lower power draw. These chips should inherently be more efficient and run cooler than other 28nm AMD chips.
They should respond very well to under volting. I would love to test these chips to see if they run stable at reasonable clock speeds with a significant reduction to TDP. The benefits would be slower wear on the GPUs while running cooler and decreasing the stress on the power supply; all without a significant drop in performance from stock
Wowwwww. I just bought the xfx 380x black edition with overclock. looks like ill be getting a duel gpu mobo in the future and getting another lol. cant believe the performance from this card for the price!
The best part is that you can buy a 380x for now and then when you want to upgrade, buy another one for the performance boost. That way you don’t have to eat $440ish all at once. Much better than paying for a 980ti or Fury X all in one piece.
Those minimum frame rates are brutal though. It isn’t so bad in bf4 but gta v would drive me mad trying to play that with sub 30fps dips.
Usually all this “bugs” are solved with driver updates. You see often in driver updates things like “50% increase performance in GTA V, 35% increase performance in Tomb Raider” etc. That’s what driver updates are there for.
please help me i have 2 r9 380x.i7 3770k. psu not a problem.but still gpu load do not go beyond 70%.even if cpu load is just 50%.please help me.i am so messed up
This is not necessarily bad. As long as your frame rates are correct, you don’t have to worry about the utilization of your CPU and GPU
thanks for this review. It convinced me to crossfire my 380X and i love it. I actually get much higher FPS and firestrike scores then you listed here. I can easily get a 18.5k graphics score just at factory overclocks and easily crack 20k when overclocked. Get over 10-20 fps extra with new drivers for battlefield 4. it also seems like AMD took this as a sign to market the cards in crossfire like they just did at computex.
thanks! too bad those minimums are so bad.. hopefully this gets ironed out in the future!
Hi all, what do you recommend as a power supply for this R9 380X CF? Will be enough 620W? (i5 6500)