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For many gamers the sweet spot for graphics cards is around the £200 mark. Over the years this has been a truly competitive sector with both AMD and NVIDIA vying aggressively for market share. With this specifically in mind AMD have just updated their range, releasing the R9 380X which will hit retail at £199.99 inc vat. So how does it stack up?
In today's market there are surprisingly few current generation GPU options available at the £200 mark. Nvidia have had the GTX970 available for some time, but the prices for these cards are firmly in the £250 sector (HERE). Their less powerful GTX 960 is £100 less, available around £150 (HERE). AMD released their R9 380 earlier this year, and prices are competitive against the GTX960 (HERE). The R9 390 is AMD's solution directly priced to compete against the GTX970 (HERE).
Based on this information we can see that the AMD R9 380X is occupying a lone spot at £199.99 inc vat right now. Well – that is until Nvidia bring a new card out to specifically target this price point.
| GPU | R9 390X | R9 290X | R9 390 | R9 290 | R9 380X | R9 380 | R9 285 | Fury X | Fury |
| Launch | June 2015 | Oct 2013 | June 2015 | Nov 2013 | Nov 2015 | June 2015 | Sep 2014 | June 2015 | June 2015 |
| DX Support | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Process (nm) | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Processors | 2816 | 2816 | 2560 | 2560 | 2048 | 1792 | 1792 | 4096 | 3584 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 176 | 160 | 160 | 128 | 112 | 112 | 256 | 224 |
| ROP’s | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 64 | 64 |
| Boost CPU Clock | 1050 | 1000 | 1000 | 947 | 970 | 970 | 918 | 1050 | 1000 |
| Memory Clock | 6000 | 5000 | 6000 | 5000 | 5700 | 5700 | 5500 | 500 | 500 |
| Memory Bus (bits) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Max Bandwidth (GB/s) | 384 | 320 | 384 | 320 | 182.4 | 182.4 | 176 | 512 | 512 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 8192 | 4096 | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 4096 | 2048 | 4096 | 4096 |
| Transistors (mn) | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 5000 | 5000 | 5000 | 8900 | 8900 |
| TDP (watts) | 275 | 290 | 275 | 275 | 190 | 190 | 190 | 275 | 275 |
The R9 380X is quite similar in specification with the R9 380 – incorporating 32 ROPs, a 256 bit memory interface with core clocks and memory clocks both set to reference speeds of 970 mhz and 1425 mhz (5.7Gbps effective) respectively. There are however 128 texture units on the R9 380X, compared with the R9 380's 112. The Stream Processor count has also been increased from 1792 to 2048.
The ASUS Strix R9 380X DirectCU II OC has enhanced clock speeds, and we will look at this in more detail on the next page of the review.
For the last couple of weeks we have been testing many graphics cards with the latest AMD and Nvidia drivers and we made the switch to the 64 bit version of Windows 10 as well.
