Serving also as a sign of things to come, it could be debated that the days of huge performance innovations with each new GPU are coming to a close.

You may regret saying that next year…

If I knew this was landing I would have held off a few weeks to get it over the R9 380!!, don't get me wrong, what I now have is awesome and runs everything silky but this would have been a better investment

Ferral
If I knew this was landing I would have held off a few weeks to get it over the R9 380!!, don't get me wrong, what I now have is awesome and runs everything silky but this would have been a better investment

I think you've done OK. For all the full fat unlocking, it's not much of an increase in performance - if something wasn't playable on the 380 it's not likely to be on the 380X either.

Ferral
If I knew this was landing I would have held off a few weeks to get it over the R9 380!!, don't get me wrong, what I now have is awesome and runs everything silky but this would have been a better investment

Same boat as you, having mine for less than a month now. Hopefully they'll be able to be unlocked to 380x with a bios flash. Still very happy with mine though.

Not bad for a midrange card, but I would much rather save another £50 and go with a 390

Yeah, for the sake of a marginal performance boost, looking at the spec the ram is 200Mhz faster and the core is clocked an extra 20Mhz so not a great deal of difference. Happy enough with what I have, it is running nicely and I did get the 4Gb card as a lot of stuff now is needing around 3Gb Vram to run stuff high / max 1080p

I would buy the GTX 970, but this is still a very good card. Although I usually run Nvidia cards I like what AMD are doing at the moment, sure Fury X was not as good as hoped but given it was first attempt using some new memory tech, I thought it was a good start. Just waiting for HBM2 to see their investment bear fruit with a real top end card

I like the idea of a 970 price cut, my 270x is looking tired at 1440p :D

Sweet, I've been waiting for this - should I wait for an MSI version?

A surprisingly solid card, decent lead over the 960 for only £20 or so more.

In some titles I wonder how much of that difference is down to 4GB vs 2GB buffers, but that doesn't take away from this being a solid win for AMD at this price point.

As mentioned by kalniel, I think its probably a little bold to be saying that big gains with new GPUs are a thing of the past, when Arctic Islands and Pascal are only 6 months or so away…
(Personally I'm guesstimating about a 40% performance lift (and I'm being a little conservative, the upper bound of my loose calculations are ~70%) based on how nVIDIA GPUs have evolved. Not looked into AMD, but that will probably be about the same.)

J3FFW1SH
Sweet, I've been waiting for this - should I wait for an MSI version?

Or you could wait for Black Friday deals …rumour has it could be some really good 390 prices

pinkpound
Or you could wait for Black Friday deals …rumour has it could be some really good 390 prices

This would be most welcome news

Another vanilla 380 owner here - I'd have gone for the 380X had I been in the market a couple of months later, but I'm still super happy with my purchase. It chews through everything I need it to at 2560x1080.

I definitely recommend the Sapphire version of this card as well, the cooler is great :)

I like what AMD brings to the table here, although it is a bit late. However, while reading the benchmarks my eyes were constantly drawn to the comparative figures posted by the R9 380. They're really not that much lower than the R9 380X, which I find a tad disappointing. That being said, the R9 380X is the most modern card by AMD, save for the Fury range, so that in itself should count for something.

manic
Hopefully they'll be able to be unlocked to 380x with a bios flash.

This would be very cool - please post back here if you come across a guide to do this please :)

Sumanji
This would be very cool - please post back here if you come across a guide to do this please :)

There should be a link on Hexus somewhere, or google for unlocking Tonga cores. The soft unlock utility said my 285 is locked down and couldn't be unlocked though.

gingerninja7
In some titles I wonder how much of that difference is down to 4GB vs 2GB buffers, but that doesn't take away from this being a solid win for AMD at this price point.

Yes, I would have liked to have seen a 2GB 380 in the review mix as I think that is the main competitor. Last I saw Novatech were selling them for £120, and when I bought my 2GB 285 I found benchmarks showing it faster than a 4GB 960 hence this is my first AMD card for over a decade.

Retail pricing is creeping uptowards £200; this is pushing it towards the 390 range and makes this imho a hardsell. Looking at whats on the 2nd hand market and 290's / 290X's are looking tempting but i havn't seen a comparrision which makes the choice harder (why pay more for less when something older can give you more ?)