MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G review

Graphics cards 1048 Page 22 of 22 Published by

teaser

Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Right, so the Radeon R9 380 is the Radeon R9 285 in a different jacket with a small tweak applied. But we stated this before, when Tonga initially launched it probably did not get the credit it really deserved. This card is sub 200 USD/EURO and really is a 1080P card, it will perform really good at that resolution, even with its 2GB of memory. Thing is, in this review I have been serving you WHQD results, 2560x1440 and even at that resolution most games run pretty good.
 

Img_2628


For mainstream gaming 2GB graphics memory however won't cut it anymore, there is a 4Gb version available as well, we do recommend you to opt for that one. 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 use 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 levels are supported in hardware. So that combined with the price 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 too heavily on image quality settings. 

Overall

When you look at the Radeon R9 380 overall, performance, Eyefinity features, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that, though we like these cards, they belong in the mainstream to even a bit of the high-end (but certainly not enthusiast) graphics card arena. We disapprove of 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 purchased say, a Radeon 7900 series card or Radeon 280 series then please do not bother to upgrade.

Img_2625

Cooling and Noise levels

The product's cooling is really good. Now we did not receive a reference product, instead we received the Gaming edition from MSI with the latest revision TwinFrozr cooler. You can expect roughly 66 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 Watts 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 MSI board, we could set the card at 1200 MHz with an added voltage control of 100 Mv. The memory reached 6.4 Gbps. Overall these are pretty terrific results coming from 1 GHz (which already was factory overclocked).
 

Guru3d-recommended

Final Words

I have stated it before, Tonga is starting to grow on me. It is the SKU that was positioned in-between the 280 and 290 as a 285 model. That segment was completely saturated and combined with only 2 GB memory that pretty much resulted in people wondering why people should actually buy it. 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, AMD's 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. MSI has a good design on their hands with the Gaming edition, it is factory overclocked a bit, totally noiseless and looks really nice including that lovely back-plate. The build quality seems to be pretty awesome. For the money the 380 is terrific value; but obviously if you purchased a Radeon series 7900 / 280 or better already, you will want to skip it. 

Recommended  Downloads

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print