MSI R9 380 Gaming 2G Reviewed

[ccokeman]

Got another one due up for Sunday night!  

[Braegnok]

 A Fathers Day present,..  wouldn't happen to be something perhaps in the Fury line,..   

Edited June 21, 2015 by Braegnok

[jdm_freek]

something something re-brand something something rebel force............ 

[Boinker]

will amds new card burn down like bulldozer or does AMD have Nvidia under wraps. one can only speculate.

[VaporX]

Okay lets clear a few things up,

 

A "rebrand" is when exactly the same product has a new sticker and name slapped on it. A "refresh" is when a product has had some under the hood changes but leaves the base feature set in place.

 

The 380, 390 and 390X are refreshs. All of these chips have had microcode and process changes that result in faster speeds from the 200 series when compared to the same architecture at the same clock speeds. Further the memory controllers have been modified to allow better memory usage and high speed.

 

Currently testing is showing the 390 is matching up to the 290X, beating in many cases the 970, something the 290 was not doing. The 390X is running right with the 980, while the 290X was always a little behind.

 

The clock boosts for these new chips is nice but lets be real the clock number increases alone are not enough for the speed bump, nor is the memory speed increase.

 

The term rebrand is not only inaccurate but purely false and more about a marketing position that the reality of what is now on the market.

[Waco]

I've seen the opposite in most reviews - when clocked similarly they perform almost exactly the same as the prior generation.

[El_Capitan]

For graphics cards, I'll say that if you can just flash a card to something else, and it's stable and performs the same (aside from power consumption and VRAM amount), then it's a rebrand. Anyone want to be brave enough to flash a HD 7950 to an R9 380?

 

On a side note, this is what I hate about rebrands (or refreshes). People who don't know any better still fall for the marketing hype. Do you know how much some HD 7950 3GB's have been going for? Under $100. Some can overclock like mad, too. People I know that don't know any better, will buy an R9 380 2GB and think it's twice as better as an "outdated" HD 7950 3GB because it's newer. I mean, someone I know "upgraded" from a HD 7970 GHz Edition to a R9 280 and said it was much faster, and worth the $200, even though I gave him the HD 7970 for free (which he ended up frying, too).

Edited June 24, 2015 by El_Capitan

[DanTheGamer11]

Will reflashing give you the four geometry processors vs the 2 in the 7950, ACE things and account for the different memory bus bandwidth and stuff?

[WarWeeny]

Will reflashing give you the four geometry processors vs the 2 in the 7950, ACE things and account for the different memory bus bandwidth and stuff?

 

When you flash a card, it magically grows extra processors and if you are lucky, it flashes the cooler too!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

hue hue hue

[Waco]

Will reflashing give you the four geometry processors vs the 2 in the 7950, ACE things and account for the different memory bus bandwidth and stuff?

%s/7950/R9 285/g

[IVIYTH0S]

 

Will reflashing give you the four geometry processors vs the 2 in the 7950, ACE things and account for the different memory bus bandwidth and stuff?

%s/7950/R9 285/g

 

I thought the 280 was the 7950

[Waco]

 

 

Will reflashing give you the four geometry processors vs the 2 in the 7950, ACE things and account for the different memory bus bandwidth and stuff?

%s/7950/R9 285/g

 

I thought the 280 was the 7950

 

The 380 is a rebrand of the 285 IIRC.