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For many, the R9 Fury X and GTX980Ti are fantasy solutions – dream cards most of us will never be able to afford. What if you only have £200 to spend and need a new graphics card that can handle resolutions up to 1440p? Today we look at the latest Sapphire R9 380 Nitro which is priced to go head to head against Nvidia's GTX960.
The matte black finished Nitro series is new for Sapphire – and KitGuru had very positive experiences with their R9 390 Nitro 8GB back in July. The R9 380 is a lower cost solution aimed at a much wider enthusiast audience – after all £200 is seen as an affordable sweet spot for many gamers.
The Sapphire R9 Nitro 4GB we are analysing today is priced at £179.99 inc vat at Overclockers UK.
| GPU | R9 390X | R9 290X | R9 390 | R9 290 | R9 380 | R9 285 |
| Launch | June 2015 | Oct 2013 | June 2015 | Nov 2013 | June 2015 | Sep 2014 |
| DX Support | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 | 12 |
| Process (nm) | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 | 28 |
| Processors | 2816 | 2816 | 2560 | 2560 | 1792 | 1792 |
| Texture Units | 176 | 176 | 160 | 160 | 112 | 112 |
| ROP’s | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 |
| Boost CPU Clock | 1050 | 1000 | 1000 | 947 | 970 | 918 |
| Peak GFLOPS (SP) | 5914 | 5632 | 5120 | 4849 | 3476 | 3290 |
| Memory Clock | 6000 | 5000 | 6000 | 5000 | 5700 | 5500 |
| Memory Bus (bits) | 512 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 256 | 256 |
| Max Bandwidth (GB/s) | 384 | 320 | 384 | 320 | 182.4 | 176 |
| Memory Size (MB) | 8192 | 4096 | 8192 | 4096 | 4096 | 2048 |
| Transistors (mn) | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 6200 | 5000 | 5000 |
| TDP (watts) | 275 | 290 | 275 | 275 | 190 | 190 |
The Antigua Pro (formerly Tonga) core on the Sapphire R9 380 Nitro is clocked at 985mhz and the 4GB of GDDR5 memory is running at 1,450MHz (5.8Gbps effective). Sapphire have opted for minor increases on both core and memory clocks, compared against the reference design.
