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ASUS STRIX R9 380 2GB Graphics Card Review

Final Thoughts

Price

The ASUS STRIX R9 380 2GB is available in the UK from OverclockersUK for just £179.99 and $219.99 from Newegg in the US.

Overview

The ASUS STRIX R9 380 2GB is a cracking card. It is priced well and the performance is enough to beat the NVIDIA GTX 960. Okay the technology is rebadged, but this has allowed AMD to fine tune and produce High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for the Fury graphics cards; this means that in the next release of graphics cards, we could see HBM in cards like this.

The STRIX cooler is a great design and it has a backplate which provides additional strength, great looks and cooling of the rear mounted components. It was able to tame this card to whisper quiet operation while keeping the temperatures low enough to be a great option for a HTPC. ASUS’ new production method of full automation has allowed for slightly better power consumption compared to the R9 285 and is poised to have a much longer lifespan. The fact that ASUS as spent considerable amounts of time fine-tuning the manufacturing process has allowed the card to drop down to a single 8 pin PCI power connection. This means that more users will have the opportunity to use this card with lower wattage power supplies such as the Corsair CX 430W with only a single 8 pin PCI power cable.

The only bad point I can think of is AMD’s marketing for this card, it was aimed at the 1440p gaming segment. Through my tests today, I found that to achieve respectable FPS at 1440p, visual quality would need to be reduced

Pros