INTRODUCTION

   As expected many of our readers are gamers and professionals who are always looking for new graphics cards to equip their systems with. Obviously not everyone's willing to spend a large sum of cash for a graphics card but luckily nowadays people don't really have to since there are numerous budget-friendly models available in the market by both NVIDIA and AMD that do surprisingly well in games and professional applications alike. Our main focus recently has been on NVIDIA cards since that's what most of you have requested but since we want to be objective and also since AMD has launched quite a few models inside 2015 and we need to have both companies in our charts we decided to take a look at one. So today with us we have one of the latest AMD models launched by MSI and more specifically the Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G.

   As a technology pioneer, MSI takes customer satisfaction as the momentum and the pioneering R&D staff as the root to market its global presence over 120 countries. A complete line-up of notebook PCs, All-in-One PCs, motherboards, graphics cards, desktops, servers, IPCs, robotic appliances and vehicle electronics demonstrate MSI's strengths and endeavors in consumer and commercial markets. With the brand slogan of "Innovation with Style," MSI spares no effort in the pursuit of excellent quality, user-friendly design and exquisite fashion products. MSI's core values "Innovation" and "Style" have made it the leading brand beyond customer expectations. As a world leading gaming brand, MSI's aim is to become the most trusted name in gaming and eSports. We stand by our principles of breakthroughs in design, the pursuit of excellence, and technological innovation as we have continued to raise the bar for ourselves and have accomplished a great deal of pioneering work in the industry.

   For the new R9 380 series of cards AMD used their latest Antigua core which is basically a slightly improved/revamped and overclocked version of the Tonga Pro core used in the older R9 285 series. So that means that the specifications of the new R9 380 cards are pretty much identical with those of the R9 285 ones since both series feature 256 Bit memory bus, GDDR5 VRAM modules, 1792 SPUs (Shader Processing Units), 32 ROPS (Render Output Units) and 112 TMUs (Texture Mapping Units). The main difference is the lower electrical requirements (always according to AMD) and the slight overclock on the core (970MHz/918MHz). The Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G by MSI which we will be testing today features a custom PCB complete with military grade quality components, a silent dual-fan cooler they call the TWIN FROZR V and a slight factory overclock of 1000MHz (OC mode) on the core clock and 1400MHz (5600MHz effective) on its 2GB GDDR5 memory. Other features include support for DirectX 12, Vulcan, Mantle, TrueAudio, Virtual Super Resolution, Eyefinity and ZeroCore (the last two are new additions not found in the R9 285 series).