Introduction
PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 380X MYST Edition 4GB
Proper gaming performance at a nice price
In this review we look at the the new PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 380X MYST 4GB. This graphics card will render your games even in the WHQD 2560x1440 range. And all that at a very reasonable price as well. With 4GB as standard for graphics memory you can game with decent image quality settings too. 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 380X graphics cards will be made available in 4 GB versions, you will also spot both reference and slightly tweaked SKUs. The GPU used in this puppy is based on Tonga which you know from the Radeon R9 285 (these days called Antigua Pro aka Radeon R9 380). The GPU used here is Antigua XT and is a fully utilized (enabled) version of the GPU, meaning that this GPU will have more shader processors available. Made on the 28nm node from Global Foundries it features the latest architectural improvements with decent power efficiency. The GPU retains technologies of the Radeon GCN lineup such as DirectX 12, FreeSync and XDMA for CrossFire support. The GPU has 2048 shader processors running over 32 ROPs with 112 texture memory units. The initial consumer graphics card based on Antigua Pro is the Radeon R9 380 with 1792 activated stream processors, the Antigua XT for the Radeon R9 380X that we review today is the same GPU again with 32 shader clusters opened up, and that is 32x64 = 2048 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 very decent card to play the latest games with whilst offering a good memory size versus good price in the 1920x1080 and even 2560x1440P monitor resolutions.
In this review we peek at a custom PCS+ model of the Radeon R9 380X, these are clocked at 1020MHz compared to the reference clock of 970 MHz. Almost all custom boards get a silent dual-fan cooler, customized PCB and that tiny factory overclock on the GPU core clock frequency with 1475 Mhz (5900 MHz effective data-rate) on this particular model from PowerColor with 4 GB GDDR5 memory. Head over to the next page where we'll start-up a photo-shoot first though.
