AMD Radeon R9 380X Official Price Confirmed, Will Cost $249 US – Specifications Finalized, Launches Tomorrow

Nov 18, 2015 at 04:50pm EST

The final details of AMD's latest Radeon R9 380X graphics card have been revealed, confirming the launch date and specifications. The Radeon R9 380X will be the latest addition to the Radeon 300 series lineup, introducing great 1080P performance at the sweet spot pricing for mainstream gamers. Based on the GCN 1.2 architecture, 380X will also feature all the latest technologies implemented on AMD's top of the line Fiji graphics core.

AMD Radeon R9 380X Specifications and Pricing Confirmed - $249 US With Tuned Antigua XT GPU

First thing we want to confirm is that the Radeon R9 380X is going to hit retail for an official MSRP of $249 US. This confirms what we have been saying for months that the card will actually be placed in the sweet spot tier for mainstream gamers which has remain untouched by NVIDIA and AMD. AMD currently has two cards near this price range, the Radeon R9 380 ($199 US) and the Radeon R9 390 ($329 US). On the NVIDIA front, we are looking at the GeForce GTX 960 ($199 US) and the GeForce GTX 970 ($299 US). Now all of these cards compete against each other well but there's a big gap left between them. For instance, the R9 390 is much faster than a R9 380 and the same could be said when comparing a GTX 970 to the GTX 960 graphics card. AMD will fill up the gap with their $249 US solution, the Radeon R9 380X.

Packed with AMD Technologies

Specifications for the Radeon R9 380X include the latest GCN 1.2 core which has only been featured on the new Fiji and Tonga cards. The Radeon R9 380X packs 32 compute units with 64 stream processors on each CU. Total number of stream processors on the card are 2048 SPs, 128 texture mapping units and 32 raster operation unit that are featured on the Antigua XT die. Antigua is a new name for Tonga which was featured on the Radeon R9 285 graphics card and the mobility chips that include Radeon R9 M295X and Radeon R9 M395X. Antigua is only currently featured on the Radeon R9 380 graphics card but the full version will be available to consumers in the form of the Radeon R9 380X graphics card. The Radeon R9 380X comes with clock speeds of 970 MHz standard clock and up to 1000 MHz boost clock. The card is configured with 4 GB of GDDR5 memory that operates along a 256-bit bus interface and clocked at a frequency of 5.7 GHz that pumps out 182.4 GB/s bandwidth.  Factory overclocked cards are expected to breach the 1 GHz core clock and further boost the memory clock up to 6.00 GHz with bandwidth of 192.00 GB/s. The Antigua XT has a peak compute performance of 4.00 TFLOPs in single precision and 0.25 TFLOPs in double precision work loads.

AMD Radeon R9 380X AIBs Prepped Custom Variants:

Image Credits/Sources: Videocardz, Zol.com.cn and Nl.Hardware.info

The card being based on the latest GCN 1.2 iteration which is the same GCN (Graphics Core Next) revision as the Fiji graphics core is fully compliant with features like Color Compression, Vulkan API support and DirectX 12 API support. The card packs 8 ACE units (Asynchronous Compute Engines) which allows tasks to be submitted and processed by shader units inside GPUs simultaneous and asynchronously in a multi-threaded fashion. Furthermore, the card comes with the latest XDMA CrossFire technology that allows multi-GPU functionality between one or more cards of the same kind effectively. The card will feature a TDP of 220W but is expect to raise with factory overclocked options. Power is provided to several variants through a dual 6-Pin power input but some cards will require a 8+6 Pin configuration to meet the overclocking requirements.

As for custom variants and performance, we have already seen a variety of non-reference cards from Sapphire, XFX, ASUS and Gigabyte. Other AMD AIB's such as PowerColor, HIS, VTX3D, Club3D, MSI will also have custom solutions readily available tomorrow in retail channels. Performance as we have determined earlier will fall in  between the Radeon R9 380 and Radeon R9 390 as the 380X fills up both the performance and price gap set in between both cards. Personally speaking, I expect the Radeon R9 380X to be a great 1080P graphics card with a bunch of features that will be available to users along with support in the latest Crimson drivers which are also launching this week.

Source: Videocardz

AMD Radeon R9 380X "Antigua XT" Specifications:

AMD Radeon R9 380AMD Radeon R9 380XAMD Radeon R9 390AMD Radeon R9 390X
GPU NameAntigua ProAntigua XTHawaii ProHawaii XT
Die Size359mm²359mm²438mm²438mm²
Compute Units28326064
Stream Processors1792204825602816
ROPs32324044
TMUs112128160176
Clock Speed970 MHz1000 MHz1000 MHz1050 MHz
Texture Fill Rate108.64 GT/s124.26 GT/s160.0 GT/s184.8 GT/s
Peak Compute (FP32)3.48 TFLOPs3.97 TFLOPs5.1 TFLOPs5.9 TFLOPs
VRAM2 - 4 GB GDDR54 GB GDDR58 GB GDDR58 GB GDDR5
Memory Clock5.5 - 5.7 GHz5.7 GHz6.0 GHz6.0 GHz
Memory Bus256-bit256-bit512-bit512-bit
Bandwidth176.2 / 182.4 GB/s182.4 GB/s384 GB/s384 GB/s
TDP190W190W275W275W
Launch Price$199 US$229 US$329$429

About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.

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