With their R9 380 STRIX 2GB, ASUS already has a custom version of their R9 380 graphics card in their portfolio. This particular card has been equipped with the manufacturers powerful Direct CU II cooler and it also features a factory overclock. With this combination the vendor wants to conquer the mid-range market for AMD based graphics cards. Are they going to succeed?


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Presentation

When AMD or NVIDIA launch new graphics chips ASUS is always amongst the very first manufacturers to show an entire new line-up of custom cards. The Radeon R9 380 2GB is based on AMDs Tonga GPU, which means the R9 380 is basically a rebranded R9 285, whereas GPU and memory clocks have been increased. There is a 256 bit memory interface and as the name of this card already suggests, this particular model ships with 2 Gigabyte VRAM. According to AMD graphics cards with this chip should be suitable for 1440p gaming. Whether this is true or not as well as quite a few other things, that's what we're going to check on the following pages.


As you can see from the GPU-Z screenshot below, ASUS decided to use a small factory-overclock on the new STRIX Radeon R9 380 2GB. While the reference Radeon R8 380 runs at 970 MHz GPU clock ASUS bumped the frequency by 20 MHz to 990MHz. A closer look at the memory reveals the AMDs board partner kept things at reference clocks. Checking frequencies with Furmark, meaning that we're applying maximum load on the GPU, we don't see any throttling at all regarind GPU as well as memory. The same applies for 3DMark. In this case, GPU-Z is telling us that the GPU frequency reamains at 990 MHz through the entire benchmark. This is also what we've noticed when running games, since there is no throttling whatsoever when running recent titles.

Specifications

	ASUS Strix R9 380 DirectCU II OC 2GB	AMD Radeon R9 285 2GB	AMD Radeon R9 280 2GB
Chip	Tonga	Tonga	Tahiti
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	5.00 billion	5.00 billion	4.31 billion
GPU clock	990 MHz	990 MHz	827 MHz
Memory GDDR5	2'048 MB	2'048 MB	2'048 MB
Memory clock	1'375 MHz	1'375 MHz	1'250 MHz
Memory interface	256 Bit	256 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	176'000 MB/s	179'200 MB/s	240'000 MB/s
TMUs	112	112	112
Shader Cores	1792	1792	1792
ROPs	32	32	32
TDP	XXXX Watt	XXXXX	XXXXX
Slots	2	2	2
Cooler	DirectCU II	AMD Reference	AMD Reference

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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