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AMD Radeon R9 380 2GB CrossFireX Graphics Cards Review

Final Thoughts

So today I had in two R9 380 graphics cards to put through CrossFireX punishment and I can only say I am extremely impressed. In the past, AMD has lost face compared to NVIDIA with the lack of driver update; they always seemed to be a step behind when it came to graphics card performance and many people jumped ship to join the green team. However, things have started to change recently, the R9 300 series is more than a match for the NVIDIA GTX 900 range (excluding GTX 980Ti) and for the first time in a while; they have released a single GPU card that can comparatively match what NVIDIA has to offer.

I can only say good things about what I have experienced today. Firstly the cost; an R9 380 2GB graphics card would set you back around £160, so this set-up would cost in the region of £320; that is incredible considering you are getting so much performance for so little money. Secondly the performance, so near to toppling the mighty NVIDIA Titan X on multiple occasions during our testing. That is around £800 worth of technology being put through its paces by a set-up that costs well under half of the price. What I particularly like about this is that the R9 380 on its own produces some great performance figures; so if you chose to purchase that and then waited for prices to reduce, you could have a very cheap gaming bundle.

One bad point which many of you would likely have guessed already is the poor drivers. In my testing today; the drivers I had (15.15.1004) failed to provide consistent CrossFire support. Thankfully I had already run my full testing procedure, but this doesn’t fill me with confidence if I had needed to re-run a test or implement a new game.

With the progression of graphics cards, performance on the lower end is perfectly matched to the amount of VRAM provided. However, when combined in a CrossFire set-up, the VRAM than becomes an issue. In the near future, we aim to bring you an AMD R9 380 4GB CrossFire review to analyse if the extra VRAM makes a difference at 4K.

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