Just in time for the Holiday season, AMD is releasing another card in their 3xx series to help fill in their lineup. Fill in their lineup you say? Don't they have 8 cards out (between the 3XX and Fury Series) already you ask? Even though they have several cards in their current lineup, from top to bottom, budget to rare unicorn, there was a fairly large performance and price gap between the R9 380 and R9 390. In comes the AMD R9 380X. The card is marketed towards being a great gaming GPU for 1080p (1920x1080) and entry level for 1440p (2560x1440). It will also come in at the $230 MSRP point. It positions itself well within its own product stack price wise, and we would imagine performance to land somewhere in between as well. When looking for a comparable NVIDIA card, it was said the 380x is to fall between the GTX 960 and 970 (another large gap of $/performance from the green camp). For this review, AMD sent us a a partner's card, the Sapphire R9 380X Nitro. The Nitro version comes with a slight overclock on the core versus the reference clockspeed, and wears a better-than-factory cooler in their Dual-X solution sporting two large 100mm fans and a beefy heatsink hiding below them and the shroud. Let's take a deeper dive into the card and see how it shakes out in the end.
