PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 4GB GDDR5 Graphic Card Review

Yet another R9 380? Wait, it’s not. It’s PowerColor’s R9 380 that comes with 4GB RAM and it has a back plate too!

As you can see from the image above, it also comes with PowerColor’s dual-blade fan design, I like it that it has only 5 blades as this makes maintenance a lot easier.

The shroud covers most part of the top of the heatsink, as you can see the card requires 2x 6-pin PCI-E to operate.

From the bottom view the shroud seems to cover the heatsink as well, though part of the heatpipes are visible.

What I think is most attractive with PowerColor cards is the backplate, lovely!

Lastly of course is the view of the I/O panel.

Last but not least, here’s the GPU-Z capture.

More details at the official product page.

Test Setup

Benchmarks

The closest (faster) card available for comparison would at goldfries’ lab is the R9 270X.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

*NOTE : Details are set to maximum.
*NOTE : AA disabled in 4K test.

Metro Last Light

Bioshock Infinite

Settings are at
2 – UltraDX11_DDOF | 2 – Custom | 1 – 16:9 | 4 – FullHD / 4K

Shadow of Mordor

Settings : Set to maximum, V-sync off.

Yup, I can’t believe what I saw here. Games like Shadow of Mordor are known to hog VRAM but I never thought it’ll limit the potential of the card that much.

Grand Theft Auto V

Settings : Set to Very High for every possible option. 8xAA enabled for Full HD test, AA Disabled for 4K test.

Temperature

Furmark Burn-in Test was used to stress the card. Fan settings are at Auto. Room set to ~25c.

The fan design is awesome but at AUTO settings it hovers at around 65% RPM and my concern about PowerColor’s fan is that it tends to be noisy but it only happens from time to time, depending on the RPM.

Power Consumption

The stress was done with Furmark Burn-in Test. Power consumption reading was taken from the watt-meter, actual power draw by the entire system from the wall point. I’m using an FSP Aurum S 700W with 90% efficiency and the estimated system power draw (CPU, not including GPU) during Furmark test is 60w.

The Verdict

The PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 4GB GDDR5 retails at RM 949, it’s not exactly cheap considering it’s basically an R9 285 but for what it’s worth the card comes with 4GB RAM and has a cool looking backplate and that makes it a much better valued proposition as compared to the 2GB variants. Compared to the already extinct R9 280X cards, the R9 380 that’s based on Tonga GPU consumes less power and the 4GB RAM available on this model does give it better performance potential when more memory is required.