The AMD Radeon R9 380X Review, Feat. ASUS STRIX

Last week AMD launched the Radeon R9 380X, the company’s latest mid-range video card. Based on a fully enabled GCN 1.2 Tonga GPU – a first for the desktop video card market – the R9 380X was timed to setup AMD product stack for the holidays and to dig out a spot in the gap between NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 960 cards. By hitting NVIDIA a bit above the ever-popular $200 spot, AMD is aiming to edge out NVIDIA on price/performance while also snagging gamers looking to upgrade from circa 2012 video cards.

Today we'll be looking at one such card, ASUS's STRIX R9 380X OC. Priced at $259 – $30 over AMD's MSRP – the STRIX R9 380X OC is ASUS's take on a premium R9 380X card, offering a very well built card and pairing it with one of the best of the R9 380X factory overclocks. To that end we'll be looking at the performance of the STRIX at both AMD's reference clocks and ASUS's factory overclock to see how this card compares to the competition, and how well it fits into AMD's holiday video card lineup.