Sapphire Nitro R9 380X 4GB Graphics Card Review with Back Plate!

Introduction If you've been reading up on the latest R9 380X range, you may have seen stories and possibly even reviews that the performance wasn't as high as many expected. I one of those who was very disappointed with the performance when compared to the R9 380 and R9 390 graphics cards by being around 10% faster than the R9 380. I really shouldn't be complaining, at a sub £200 price point, the R9 380X is poised as a great 1440p graphics card; albeit with some settings lowered to medium or high from ultra. Today in the test bench we have the Sapphire Nitro R9 380X. Fitting in nicely to the current Nitro range from Sapphire at just £199.99, this card features an identical cooling design as the R9 380 but with one huge visual improvement, which I will disclose later. The card features 16K capacitors for ultra long life and an increased core and memory clock to 1040MHz and 6000MHz respectively, so we should expect improved performance over what we have been witnessing so far. Before anyone starts chanting "rebrand", stop! As much as I agree that this is technically a rebrand, I'm now actually re-wording that to remanufacturing. A rebrand would be taking the R9 285, put a new cooling design on there and calling it an R9 380 with no other changes. However, the R9 380 and R9 380X are remanufactured with a much more precise manufacturing procedure to squeeze as much performance as possible from the Antigua GPU Core. Packaging and Accessories The Nitro box has changed for this card compared to the rest of the R9 Nitro range. We now have a simple portrait style box without a window to show off the contents. I really think Sapphire want everyone to know that this card has a back plate fitted. Accessories are simple, general paper based material, driver disk, case sticker and DVI to VGA adapter. A Closer Look Considering the £200 price tag, the card feels solid. The cooling shroud hugs the perimeter of the card and the backplate adds a good weight. I know the Nitro range has a grey theme and I like the understated look, but I wish Sapphire offered other colours like blue or red, to make the inserts to be less bland. Now that's more like it, I'm so fed up of mainstream manufacturers thinking if the price is under £250 they can get away without a back plate. All it takes is one sheet of metal and it instantly improves things. Those dimples correspond to rear mounted voltage regulation chips which are joined by a thermal pad to help with heat removal. Such a clean looking card from this angle but one thing I don't like is how tall the card is and then having the power connectors on this side of the card. Users of cases such as the Corsair Air 240 may find themselves having to bend the power connectors far too much to get things to fit nicely. Here you can really get the idea of how wide this card actually is compared to the IO plate. Aside from that, this card features 1x DVI-I, 1x DVI-D, 1x HDMI and 1x DisplayPort. Testing & Methodology Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to overview our test system. All tests will be conducted with the latest stable drivers available, with results will be taken from an average of three tests. All tests will be conducted using the highest factory setting if multiple options are available. Hardware Motherboard - Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 WiFi LGA 2011-3 Motherboard Processor - Intel Core i7 5820K at Stock 3.3GHz RAM - 16GB (4 X 4GB) Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz CPU Cooler - Thermaltake Water 3.0 with Gelid GC-Extreme Power Supply - BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 11 1200W Main Storage Drive - Crucial M550 512GB Chassis - Lian Li T80 Test Bench Displays - AOC U2868PQU 4K Operating System - Windows 8.1 Pro 64 Bit Additional Hardware "Killawatt” style electricity usage meter wall plug Precision Gold N05CC Decibel meter Drivers Software Battlefield 4 Grand Theft Auto V Metro Last Light Tomb Raider 3DMark Unigine Valley Unigine Heaven CPU-ID HWMonitor TechPowerUp GPU-Z Luxmark Synthetic Benchmarks During our testing, we use a range of readily available synthetic benchmarking tools which are free to download from the respective websites. We do this so the readers can download and compared to our results. Download links are contained within the "Software" subheading. Noise Everyone has their own reasonable noise level when it comes to comes to components in a computer. Some can handle all fans at 100% load to keep temperatures down, some want a completely silent computer. Power Consumption With electricity becoming increasingly expensive across most parts of the world the need for computer components to become power efficient has never been more relevant. Graphics cards are often the most power-hungry components inside a desktop system so having an efficient graphics card is very important to keeping power bills under control. Power is often correlated to heat and so lower power consumption means a graphics card is likely to run slightly cooler and put out less heat into your system meaning your other components will run cooler with improved longevity. AMD and Nvidia have both made power consumption an integral part of the way graphics cards dynamically overclock so the need for graphics card vendors to use efficient VRM and PCB designs is becoming important to maximise performance. We take power readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. Temperatures The cooling solution which graphics card vendors choose to implement is one of the main differences that consumers have to contend with when choosing a graphics cards. Apart from their acoustic properties, the thermal properties of graphics card coolers are extremely important. Lower temperatures are always better and with AMD and Nvidia opting to use dynamic overclocking algorithms that take temperature into account it is important that graphics card vendors use high-performance cooling solutions in order to maximise performance. The era of graphics cards reaching dangerous temperatures are now in the past but the importance of lower temperatures still remains. Lower temperatures mean better stability, longer component longevity and lower fan speeds. We take temperature readings after 5 minutes of two different load scenarios: desktop idle and Unigine Heaven load. We always record actual temperatures and make a note of the ambient; in the case where more than 1 GPU is used an average is created. Synthetic Benchmarks 3D Mark 3DMark scores with this card are actually quite impressive compared to how some R9 380X units are performing. Still not where I expected the card to score, but a very good boost over the R9 380. A linear drop in performance to 1440p and 4K where the R9 380X holds a steady lead over the R9 380. Unigine Valley Unigine Valley gives a much clearer image to roughly how the cards would perform compared to on another, but the compute performance compared to the very strong Maxwell architecture is proven here. Unless AMD is planning to bring out an R9 385 in the future, this cards performance is a flop at a mere 10% higher than the R9 380. Compute Performance Putting the card through Luxmark and the aging architecture is starting to show, just ticking over 2000; pretty much what we expected. Battlefield 4 I feel that the gaming tests are going to present similar information that we have already seen in regards to the performance difference of the R9 380, 380X and 390. However, at 1080p, FPS of 73 is a much nicer figure to have and gives you that buffer above 60FPS for optimal performance. The 1440p performance isn't as great, but remember we do test on the highest settings. If you knock a few of those down to Medium/ High, you could happily see 60FPS here. 4K is way out of reach for this card, just 22FPS. Grand Theft Auto V As with another review yesterday, the GTA V performance is a lot higher than expected with the R9 380X nipping at the GTX 970 in each test. This was consistent across three runs and each time the graphical settings were checked for accuracy. That being said, GTA V is still a very demanding game and only offers 69FPS at 1080p. 48FPs at 1440p isn't too bad considering the price point of this card, a drop in graphical settings would definitely see the scores rise above 60FPS. Metro Last Light Metro brings the performance more in line with previous figures. A respectable 73FPS at 1080p and 47FPS at 1440p are exactly what AMD had suggested would be the performance of this card. Tomb Raider Tomb Raider provides the best graphical stress for the graphics card, with an easy 117FPS at 1080p and 76FPS at 1440p. 4K still proves too demanding for this card and no amount of lowering the settings would reap an acceptable gameplay experience. Overclocking and Overclocked Performance From experience with the Antigua architecture, I wasn't expecting much of an overclock here. With a respectable 103MHz core increase and a boost up to 6500MHz memory, performance should improve. 3DMark Fire Strike Now this is more like it. The overclocked score is almost exactly where I pictured the R9 380X scoring out of the box. It's good to know that this GPU can perform and fill that gap between the R9 380 and 390. If you draw a straight line between the R9 380 and R9 390 graphics results, the line will intersect both of the R9 380X scores. Maybe this is a sign that the 380X is being held back slightly in performance to allow for another card to enter the range? An almost perfect line up! Noise, Power Consumption and Temperatures Noise Unlike our previous card we didn't have any issues with the voltage, so our Acoustic, Temperature and Power Consumption tests will be more reliable. Thanks to the passive feature on a lot of the R9 300 range, this card is silent at idle. Even when running a benchmark, it is difficult to distinguish between which fan is making the most noise on the test bench, Power Consumption A very respectable consumption here. At stock settings the 380X uses slightly less power than the original 380. Temperatures This card runs cool and quiet thanks to that Dual-X cooling design. The black plate didn't impact cooling with it removed or installed, but could prove an issue with these cards were used in Crossfire. Final Thoughts Price The Sapphire Nitro R9 380X is currently available from OverclockersUK for £199.99. NeweggUS currently has this card listed for $229.99. While that's an Okay price, I was expecting more towards the £180/$205 which would have put it more in line with the performance per Pound/ Dollar of the R9 380. Overview It's refreshing to test a mainstream graphics card from time to time, it cleanses the mind from all of the unbelievably high scores of the R9 Fury X and similar and puts you back into the real world. This card will no doubt be a big hitter with the gaming enthusiasts who only want to game at 1080p, but may possibly upgrade to 1440p in the future without having to worry about spending the additional £70+ on an R9 390. The performance was below my expectations, I was hoping for a middle of the road performance offering between the R9 380 and 390, but sadly we were given around 10% more than the R9 380. While that is good and it shows that there is more potential in the Antigua core, I want more! We have heard news stories that AMD are promising two new GCN GPU's in 2016; will this be the card to fill the gap? Maybe this will be the R9 300 equivalent of the R9 285, which was based on the new GCN 1.2, but introduced in the R9 200 series. It's not exactly the most striking unit in the world, it would quite happily sit in your computer and exist and you wouldn't care. When you think back to the days of the bonkers Tri-X cooling design that you would gloat to your friends about, Sapphire has come a long way. The lines are sharp and the PCB and cooling shroud line up perfectly with minimal overhang, making the overall appearance very clean. That back plate is something to admire, Sapphire didn't have to include it on a card of this price, but it did and that might be a deal breaker for a lot of buyers. One thing I wish Sapphire included or produced as an option is interchangeable inserts for the logo to add a bit of flair to the inside of your computer. I know I said understated is better when the Nitro first released, but even I take that back. If the card was slightly cheaper, or once the drivers are better optimised for performance, this card would be an absolute stormer, but at its current price point I don't feel it is big enough of an advancement to recommend over the R9 380; it's a tough call. Pros Reasonable performance boost of the R9 380 Silent operation Respectable 1440p performance with some settings lowered Cons None Neutral Not the 'gap filler' that was expected from an 'X' card "The Sapphire Nitro R9 380X took what made the R9 380 good and made it great; a perfect choice for gamers on a budget."