Sapphire Nitro R9 380X 4G D5

Six months after the introduction of AMD’s most affordable mid-range gaming GPU, the Radeon R9 380, the company launched the slightly faster R9 380X. The original R9 380 came with 256 of its processor cores disabled, leaving a total of 1792 available for use, but now the R9 380X comes with all 2048 cores available for use. Other than that, the two GPUs are the same.

Price

You can buy the Nitro R9 380X 4G D5 for £199 from Scan (scan.co.uk). The part code is 11250-01-20G.

An almost identical version of this card – part code 11242-07-20G – is available with the original R9 380 GPU, with is also made in a version without the backplate and with slower clock speeds out of the box. It costs around £180. For a more considerable saving, you could go for a 2GB version of the R9 380 card, either with or without the backplate.

With so many slightly different models available, it’s important to make sure of exactly which version you’re looking at when buying – especially if you’re hunting for the lowest available price.

If you can afford it, we would recommend going for a 4GB model with a backplate, as it’s less likely to get damaged, it’s faster, and it’s more capable of being pushed to higher resolutions, thanks to the additional memory.

At the time of writing, the price difference between Sapphire’s R9 380 and R9 380X versions is only around £20, so unless you’re working to the very strictest of budgets, we’d suggest going for the R9 380X. The difference

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in performance is small but measurable, and resale value is likely to be higher. The R9 380X also represents the highest performance you can get before a big price jump up to the R9 390, which costs around £270.

Features

This ‘Nitro’ version from Sapphire builds upon AMD’s reference design by adding an advanced cooling solution with twin thermostaticallycontrolled fans and thick heatpipes enabling quieter operation, along with a preset factory overclock for an additional boost in performance.

The Nitro R9 380X 4G D5 now sits at the top of Sapphire’s extensive range of cards based on AMD R9 380-series GPUs, which includes no fewer than five models based on the standard R9 380, four of which are designated ‘Nitro’.

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Each of the Nitro models is constructed to a very high level of build quality – there’s nothing flimsy or fragile about it, and this 4GB R9 380X version comes with a backplate, which shields the boards internal components while helping with heat dissipation.

The board features a full-height dual-slot design, so keep this in mind if your system case is tight on space, but it should fit in most standard systems with ease. You’ll need a pair of six-pin PCI-E connectors to power it, and with a claimed maximum power draw of 225W you shouldn’t need a beefy PSU to keep it running. The card comes factory overclocked to 1040MHz – up from AMD’s standard speed of 970MHz and you can push for even higher speeds using the supplied TriXX overclocking software. On-board memory also gets a 5 percent performance boost as standard.

One up and running, it’s possible to see the twin cooling fans of the ‘Dual-X’ cooler spinning up and down individually as required

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