As rumored and expected earlier, AMD has now officially announced its new Antigua XT-based Radeon R9 380X graphics card which will pack 2048 Stream Processors and start at US $229.

The new Radeon R9 380X is based on AMD's "new" Antigua XT GPU (previously known as Tonga XT) and packs 2048 Stream Processors, 32 ROPs, 128 TMUs and comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. The reference GPU clock is set at 970MHz while the memory is clocked at 5.7GHz, providing 182GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Starting at US $229, the new Radeon R9 380X fits precisely between US $190 priced Geforce GTX 960 and the US $319 priced GTX 970, which should help AMD move plenty of these graphics cards, hitting just below the US $250 sweet spot.

AMD AIB partners will be able to come up with custom designs from day one and you should see them paired up with plenty of good custom coolers like ASUS' DirectCU II, MSI's TwinFrozr, Gigabyte's Windforce 2X and others.

Our thoughts on this topic:

According to a couple of first published reviews, the Radeon R9 380X does cover the gap left in the sub-$250 market by both AMD and Nvidia but does not offer a good price/performance ratio compared to the other graphics cards in a "similar" price segment. It also uses a bit more power compared to Nvidia Maxwell GPUs and compared to slightly higher priced GTX 970, does leave a lot to be desired.

While AMD could do good with a US $229 priced graphics card, we believe that Nvidia still has room for a slight price adjustment on the GTX 970 and we have already heard rumors regarding the Geforce GTX 960 Ti which could launch at the same price point and offer both much better energy efficiency as well as better price/performance ratio.



Source: AMD.com.