AMD R9 380X 4GB Graphics Card CrossFire Review

Rikki Wright / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

The cards used within this Crossfire article were the Sapphire Nitro R9 380X and the XFX DD R9 380X. Both of these cards can be purchased for well under £200 ($230) each at most retailers and both currently have very good stock availability.

Overview

I quite like this model in Crossfire, the price vs performance is reasonable and with near R9 Fury X and GTX 980Ti performance for around £100 less you can’t really complain. You do have the extra power consumption and possible gaming issues, but if you are going to buy into a Crossfire set-up you could already know the issues and limitations.

The performance wasn’t quite where I’d expect, considering how well the single card performed at 1440p. That being said, very strong 1440p and low 4K performance is easily had with these two cards and with the £400 price point, it would be hard to say no. I would probably put these into a high-end 1440p gaming system that would have the power to play games for a few years into the future. You could reduce the settings and play at 4K, but newer games may prove too demanding and end up pushing you down to 1440p anyway. Just take a look at Fallout 4 and the GTX 780 requirement, completely bonkers for a 1080p game to see how far developers are pushing games today.

I’ll be honest, these two cards in Crossfire wasn’t a pretty sight. The XFX model was dwarfed by the boxy Sapphire model, which is not only longer it is taller too. Like I mentioned earlier in the article, Crossfire (and SLI) configurations work much better when two of the same card is used

I’m not going to hold my breath that this is the last R9 38x iteration, I still believe that AMD has positioned this card perfectly to allow the addition of an R9 385 into the range which may possibly bring GCN 1.3 with it for the next range of graphics cards.

Pros

Great performance vs price
4GB VRAM is perfectly suited for high-end 1440p gaming
Great product range available with good stock levels

Cons

Power hungry for relatively low-end cards

Neutral

The XFX model got hot and loud under testing

“The R9 380X Crossfire options offers possibly one of the best budget friendly graphics performance on the market today, undercutting the top cards in price but matching performance.”