ASUS Strix R9 380 DirectCU II OC 2GB Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 23.06.15Page:
The card
ASUS decided to equip their Radeon R9 380 STRIX with the latest iteration of their DirectCU cooler. A closer look at it shows there is a total of three heatpipes, whereas the one in the middle measures 10 millimeter in diameter and the two on the outside measure 8 millimeter. All heatpipes have been soldered to the dense and large fin stack, providing good cooling. ASUS also offers fans, which do not spin, when the temperature is below a certain threshold. Therefore this particular card is inaudible, when the system is in idle, or in other words when there is no load on the GPU. Under load conditions the fan profile has been setup to keep the card below 80°C, which is a perfectly reasonable temperature target. In the end there is a good compromise between temperature and noise level. Even under high load the card is very silent.
The ASUS Radeon R9 380 2GB graphics card, or to be precise our sample of it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'100 MHz for the GPU and 6'300 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D benchmark with 15 minutes duration and 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme.
A closer look at the PCB shows that ASUS equipped this graphics card with a 6+2 phase power design. The GPU gets its current from six phases and two phases are taking care of the memory.
Checking the voltage regulation chip we find an ASP1300, which has been labelled DIGI+. Apart from that the ASUS is making use of high-quality M3054M chips regarding the phases from UP Semiconductor.
The memory chips on the ASUS Radeon R9 380 STRIX 2GB come from ELPIDA and they carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective), which means that there is quite some overclocking potential regarding on the memory side.
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