MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G review - Introduction

MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G
Tonga re-injected yet surprizingly good

In this review we look at the MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming. Armed with a TwinFrozr cooler this product brings you mainstream gaming at a price of roughly 200 USD - with 2GB and 4GB options of graphics memory you can game with decent image quality settings at Full HD. Follow us into this review where we'll look at temperatures, noise, performance and go with the latest game titles on the globe.

The Radeon R9 380 graphics cards will become available in 2GB and 4 GB versions, the GPU used you all know already as Tonga, the same GPU used on the Radeon R9 285. Made on the 28nm node from Global Foundries it features the latest architectural improvements with decent power efficiency. Tonga retains the basic technologies of the Radeon lineup such as Mantle, TrueAudio and XDMA for CrossFire support. The GPU has 1792 shader processors running over 32 ROPs with 112 texture memory units. 

The initial consumer graphics card based on Tonga was the fairly similar Radeon R9 285 with 1792 activated stream processors, the Tonga for the R9 380 is the same GPU again with 1792 active shader processors. The reference cards will have two 6-pin power PEG (PCI Express Graphics) headers to give the tweaking experience a little more room next to the 4+2 PWM phase power design. Overall a decent card to play the latest games with whilst offering a good memory size versus good price versus the Full HD  / 1080P monitor resolution. 

In this review we peek at the MSI Gaming model of the Radeon R9 380. A product with a very silent dual-fan cooler, customized PCB and tiny factory overclock at 1000 MHz on the GPU core clock frequency with 1400 / 5600 (effective)  MHz on its 2 GB GDDR5 memory. Head over to the next page where we'll start-up a photo-shoot first though.