Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Alright let's get the elephant out of the room first, it is what it is right? The Radeon R9 380 is the Radeon R9 285 in a different jacket with a small tweak applied. Nothing about this release is new or rather exciting. We do have to admit though, when Tonga initially launched it probably did not get the credit it really deserved.

See the big problem was the 280X that was sitting smack down on its performance and features. Another massive fail was that the 285 was released as a 2GB card only, and nobody really wants a 2GB card these days. As such I must admit that I was flabbergasted that ASUS decided to send out the 2 GB SKU opposed to the also available 4 GB model. Let me put it simple, for mainstream gaming 2GB graphics memory won't cut it anymore. You've seen in our review that the modern titles will crap out completely at WHQD as they run out of memory. GTA-V would not even allow us to move anything higher than normal texture quality and the latest battlefield Hardline (which by now I find to be a shockingly bad game title) just caves in. Tonga, or Antigua whatever AMD prefers it to be called now however does deserve a little more credit, as honestly it performs well for the money and is indeed fighting quite well with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 960. You have to give the product that bit of credit. Another benefit is that at least the most simple DirectX 12 Feature level is supported in hardware. So combined for the money you can't complain if you stick at 1080P for a monitor resolution. And with a 4GB model, hey WHQD at 2560x1440 remains possible if you do not over-configure your games to heavily on image quality settings. 

Overall

When you look at the Radeon R9 285 380 overall, performance, Eyefinity features, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we like these cards belong in the mainstream to even a bit of high-end (but certainly not enthusiast) graphics card arena. We disapprove the 2 GB models anno 2015 though. Especially when you market the product as a 2560x1440 graphics card then the 2 GB is just too marginal with the latest games in that resolution. Overall we think the R9 380 remains to be a very decent Full HD gaming card, WHQD is possible but you'll find yourself un-ticking graphics quality options pretty fast to gain on framerate performance and to lower graphics memory utilization. My recommendation stands as it is, if in the past you've purchase say a Radeon 7900 series card or Radeon 280 series then please do not bother to upgrade.

Cooling and Noise levels

The product's cooling is really good. Now we did not receive a reference product, instead we received the Strix edition from ASUS with the latest revision DirectCU cooler. You can expect roughly 70 Degrees C under heavy GPU load in a proper ventilated PC with this specific model. Directly related to the cooling are the noise levels, we have no complaints here. This is a very silent card, in IDLE the fans will not even spin as it sticks to passive cooling.

Power Consumption 

The board is rated by us at roughly 190~200 Watt TDP, that means when you completely stress it, that's the power consumption. Our measurements showed that the board TDP is indeed roughly in that Wattage region. This is reasonable for this kind of performance especially when you take into account that the product is factory overclocked for you (albeit a tiny bit). 

Overclocking

Overclocking then, we see average results with our ASUS board, we could set the card at 1100 MHz but did not have voltage control just yet. 1150 MHz stability caved in pretty fast. The memory reached 6 Gbps which is nice but the Elpida memory doesn't work wonders, anything over 6.5 Gbps results into crashes. Maybe our card was not the best batch as we find the OC results are a bit average.
 

Final Words

Tonga is starting to grow on me, it is the SKU that was positioned in-between the 280 and 280 as a 285 model. That segment was completely saturated and combined with only 2 GB memory that pretty much resulted into a huge FAIL.  It is interesting though to see how the mind works, see at a mainstream price performance level, Tonga (Antigua) can make sense. Stick to a 4GB model and you will have a very viable 1080P card running with "OK" performance even into the WHQD (2560x1440) monitor domain. Overall for just under 200 USD the Radeon R9 380 offers decent performance for the money. Fact remains that we can't trawl away from the fact that in the past three years everybody probably already purchased a 7900 or 280 series card. So as an upgrade this product is going to be a difficult sell for the AMD aficionados. But for a Full HD gamer coming from the 7800 series, this product at 200 USD could make a lot of sense. That is by the way AMDs biggest problem, in the past 2-3 years everybody already moved towards say a 280 or 290 right ? So why would one be bothered by a respin product ? These choices might kill AMD graphics cards sales.

ASUS has a very nice design in their hands with the Strix, it is factory overclocked a bit, totally noiseless and looks really nice including that superb back plate. The build quality seems to be pretty awesome. Anyway, from Tonga to Antigua yes it is a respin, albeit for the money; not a bad one that would be my conclusion. But if you purchased a Radeon series 7900 / 280 or better you will want to skip it. 

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