Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X Review

Last week AMD released their mid range R9 380X and today we supplement our launch review by taking a look at the Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X. Right now AMD have no directly competing card at the same price (£200) so partners are able to offer up some competitive solutions to tempt the enthusiast gamer.

As we said at launch – in today’s market there are surprisingly few current generation GPU options available at the £200 mark. Nvidia have had the GTX970 available for some time, but the prices for these cards are firmly in the £250 sector (HERE). Their less powerful GTX 960 is £100 less, available around £150 (HERE). AMD released their R9 380 earlier this year, and prices are competitive against the GTX960 (HERE). The R9 390 is AMD’s solution directly priced to compete against the GTX970 (HERE).

GPU	R9 390X	R9 290X	R9 390	R9 290	R9 380X	R9 380	R9 285	Fury X	Fury
Launch	June 2015	Oct 2013	June 2015	Nov 2013	Nov 2015	June 2015	Sep 2014	June 2015	June 2015
DX Support	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12	12
Process (nm)	28	28	28	28	28	28	28	28	28
Processors	2816	2816	2560	2560	2048	1792	1792	4096	3584
Texture Units	176	176	160	160	128	112	112	256	224
ROP’s	64	64	64	64	32	32	32	64	64
Boost CPU Clock	1050	1000	1000	947	970	970	918	1050	1000
Memory Clock	6000	5000	6000	5000	5700	5700	5500	500	500
Memory Bus (bits)	512	512	512	512	256	256	256	4096	4096
Max Bandwidth (GB/s)	384	320	384	320	182.4	182.4	176	512	512
Memory Size (MB)	8192	4096	8192	4096	4096	4096	2048	4096	4096
Transistors (mn)	6200	6200	6200	6200	5000	5000	5000	8900	8900
TDP (watts)	275	290	275	275	190	190	190	275	275

The R9 380X is quite similar in specification with the R9 380 – incorporating 32 ROPs, a 256 bit memory interface with core clocks and memory clocks both set to reference speeds of 970 mhz and 1425 mhz (5.7Gbps effective) respectively. There are however 128 texture units on the R9 380X, compared with the R9 380’s 112. The Stream Processor count has also been increased from 1792 to 2048.

The Sapphire Radeon R9 Nitro 380X has enhanced clock speeds, and we will look at this in more detail on the next page of the review.

For the last couple of weeks we have been testing many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and we made the switch to the 64 bit version of Windows 10 as well.