XFX has just launched a new Radeon R9 380 graphics card in their Radeon R9 380 Crimson Edition, which is made exclusively for the Chinese Market. This is sort of a late entry for XFX as the Radeon R9 380 was introduced way back in 2015, but this card has a really cool feature many R9 380’s do not. The card has the ability to be unlocked to a full R9 380X graphics card with the flick of a switch.
Most graphics cards these days ship with a dual or triple BIOS design, which can be accessed by a button or switch on the PCB of the card. These BIOS’s allow users to save overclocking profiles and revert back to the factory settings if need be. While we’ve seen manufactures store OC profiles in a secondary BIOS, XFX actually went one step further by adding a custom profile that fully unlocks the card to a R9 380X.
On its default setting the XFX Radeon R9 380 Crimson Edition has 1792 Stream Processors, is clocked at 990 MHz and has 4GB of GDDR5 memory. When flip the switch to unlock the card it gives you 2048 Stream Processors, a clock speed of 1040 MHz and the 4GB of memory gets a 100 MHz boost up to 5800 MHz. How much of a difference does this make? Here are the 3DMark 11 results of the card running in normal mode, then unlocked.
The card has a custom PCB with a 4+1+1 power phase design. It is powered by a single 8-pin power connector and display outputs include Dual-DVI, HDMI, and a single DisplayPort. The card has a very attractive red shroud with matching dual fans. These fans can actually be removed for easy cleaning.
Sadly this card was made for the Chinese market and will be available in the APAC region, so it is very unlikely we will see it here in the US.
Source: Expreview | News Archive
