Final Thoughts
The simple fact is not everyone can afford the high-end AMD Fury cards or NVIDIA’s 980 / 980 Ti cards. For that reason many gamers and enthusiasts are looking to spend in the $200-$250 price range. This gives them the best performance for their money. This card will be more than powerful enough to handle the latest titles at 1080p. Moving up to 1440p you will have to turn settings down a good bit. When it comes to 4K I would not recommend this card, even with its 4GB of VRAM 4K is a little out of reach if you want decent quality. Keep in mind this card was never made with 4K gaming in mind though.
MSI has put their own unique style on this card. The Twin Frozr cooler has proved itself over and over again and this card is no exception to that. Temperatures were more than acceptable. The cooler also features MSI’s Zero Frozr technology, which will turn the fans off when they are not needed. Even with the fans spinning the cooler is very quiet. The card features three different operating modes, which you can select from using MSI’s Gaming App. MSI has decided to make all of their cards in the Gaming Series look the same, which I really like. You know what a Gaming Series card looks like and they are quite easy to match with a number of motherboards.
Since this card is based off of Antigua (rebranded Tonga), you have full DirectX 12 support, support for Mantle and Vulkan APIs, FreeSync and Virtual Super Resolution. So if you have upgraded to Windows 10 or plan to this card will be fully compatible.
One value addon that really is not listed on the packaging and is towards the bottom of the product page for the card is the fact that you get a free 6 month license to XSplit Gamecaster. So if you planned on doing any type of casting you are set.
Right now this card is selling at my favorite online retailer for $239.99, which puts it in the same price range as other custom R9 380’s with 4GB of memory. This is one of the better R9 380’s out there and one we would totally recommend. Overall ThinkComputers gives the MSI R9 380 Gaming Graphics Card a 9 out of 10 score and our Recommended Award!
Pros:
– Good performance
– Factory overclocked
– 3 different modes
– Good cooling
– Comes with the 6 month license for Xsplit
Cons:
– Not the fastest R9 380 out there
Thanks for the review! I will say other than listed in test set-up you completely missed covering the Gaming Mode (980 MHz / 5700MHz) as tested “out-of-the-box”, while the MSI Gaming App software is used to enact the OC Mode (1000 MHz / 5800 MHz). I think that would be useful to readers
and those that watched the video to provide some detail on that. Interestingly you did provide a lot of “ink” on that subject back with the MSI GTX 770 Gaming review back Oct, 2013, even providing B-M in both Gaming and OC’d. I think that would’ve been to correct way to provide a consistent position for all your reviews.
You might want to say that the idle temperature is at 52°C as that because the ZeroFrozr technology which stops the
fans when they are not needed at that point basically a full-passive mode.
I’m really disappointed you neglected to include the results of you MSI GTX 960 Gaming review from February 10th. That is the more proper comparison as it’s the Nvidia product that is it closest competitor, while 770’s have be EoL for almost a year now. Looking at both the GTX 960 review and the MSI GTX 770 you’ve appear to have change your test rig, and the B-M titles used so those older reviews weren’t transferable. That said, I have a hard time saying a loop of Heaven B-M is characteristic of gaming loads, and from other reviews I’ve seen the inference that a MSI GTX 770 Gaming is like 4.5% better than a MSI 380 Gaming (@980MHz) at load is abnormal. I mean look at the Stix 970 and the 770 with the Maxwell only using 7% less. That MSI
770 Gaming you have is some golden sample right there!
Agreed, it does seem the review misses the main characteristics of the card–which is really amazing, when you think about it…;) That’s the quickest route to web-site obscurity, imo.