ASUS Strix R9 380 DirectCU II OC 2GB Review

Published by Marc Büchel on 23.06.15
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Conclusion


General + -
The R9 380 STRIX is yet another good custom card from ASUS. The DirectCU II cooler, which is capable of deactivating the fans, when the cards is in idle does a great job. Apart from that there is a high quality power design and memory, which can be overclocked by quite a bit. AMD has been claiming that the R9 380 should be suitable for 1440p gaming. Having a closer look at the results gathered in 10 different games, leaves aus with mixed feelings. Most of the mature games, like for example Battlefield 4 run 1440p with high details with 30 to 40 fps. If you lower the detaisl you can hit even 50 or in best case 60 frames per second. But on the other hand there are also titles like Crysis 3 and Far Cry 4, which need a little more power. Even if you lower the details with these games we wouldn't recommend running 1440p. You might have been asking yourself why there are no results in 2160p. With our new GPU chart we decided not to test cards with less than 3GB VRAM with UHD resolution. 2GB is simply not enough for UHD, which results in very low fps numbers.   - Cooling
- Design
- Noise level
 
 
Cooling / Noise Level   + -
As noted earlier, the DirectCU II cooler on this particular card is quite powerful. We very much like the fact, that in idle this card is inaudible, since the fans are not spinning at all. Under load the card is still very silent and the cooler maintains a maximum temperature of 80°C, which is a perfectly reasonable temperature target.   - Inaudible in 2D
- Silent in 2D
 
 
Performance   + -

Compared to the reference design, this card features a 20MHz factory overclock. Therefore the performance is a little bit higher then the reference design. A closer look at the numbers we got out of the R9 285 (the R9 380 is based on the same chip) reveals that the R9 380 is about 10 percent quicker, which is due to the higher clock speeds on the GPU as well as the memory.

When it comes to power consumption we see that our system burns 65 Watts in idle and 260 Watts under full load. Overall power consumption is on the level we expected it to be and the high quality power design helps scraping off a few Watts every here and there.

   
 
Recommendation / Price   + -
At the moment we find this card listed in Europe for 236 Euro. At this price point the ASUS Radeon R9 380 2GB is a decent card with a great cooler. Should you be looking for an AMD based card, that allows you to play games at 1080p and some titles even at 1440p, then this particular model is a good choice.   - 1080p Gaming
- Silent PC
 
The ASUS Radeon R9 380 2GB receives good 4 out of 5 stars.
 



 




Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications Page 11 - Thief
Page 2 - The card Page 12 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery Page 13 - Metro Last Light
Page 4 - Test Setup Page 14 - Far Cry 4
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike Page 15 - GTA V
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0 Page 16 - GRID Autosport
Page 7 - Battlefield 4 Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Watch Dogs Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise Levels
Page 9 - Tomb Raider Page 19 - Performance Index & Price
Page 10 - Crysis 3 Page 20 - Conclusion
   





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