CONCLUSION

   I never had the chance to play around with the Radeon R9 285 cards so I don’t know exactly what kind of performance they offer but the R9 380 Gaming 2G by MSI was a surprise since we feel that it’s the best graphics card money can buy at around the USD200/200Euros price point (I honestly was expecting the GeForce GTX 960 to be faster but as you can see it’s not). Of course if you plan on playing in resolutions of 1920x1200 and over then this card might not be the best choice since although it does ok now in a year things will probably not look so well (the 4GB variant however should boost performance a bit on high resolutions). Performance may be quite good for such a card but when it comes to power consumption the R9 380 Gaming 2G disappoints since it consumers more even compared to a much more powerful graphics card like the GeForce GTX 980. On the bright side temperatures and noise levels are much better than we had hoped although we did notice the fan of the cooler spinning even while idle (still it was inaudible).

   After a few months in the market the price of the MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G has dropped a bit and so currently you can find it for just USD208.98 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 218Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk). Needless to say you can opt for the reference model if you wish to save some money but I see very little point for that since the MSI solution is prettier and offers military grade components, improved cooling, low noise levels and factory OC. Bottom line casual gamers who place performance only second to price need not think things much since the MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2G is the obvious choice and that’s why it gets our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality
- Performance
- Noise Levels
- Design
- Temperatures
- Military Grade Components
- Factory OC / OC Headroom
- Price (For Some)

CONS

- Power Consumption
- Memory OC Headroom