Overall and Final Verdict
Having already tested one R9 380 I had a good idea of what to expect when going into the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380. What I wasn’t sure about was just what PowerColor was doing different on their 380’s and also how the doubled vRAM would change the cards performance. When it comes to the card, I was happy to see that PowerColor includes a metal backplate and fan shroud. Going with metal over plastic gives the card a more solid feel while I admit that I would prefer to see the backplate be a machined aluminum over a stamped sheet metal. I would love to see PowerColor go with slightly larger fans but only large enough to fit in the space in the current design, I love that this design isn’t obnoxiously large like most cards are these days.
Sadly the smaller size and smaller fans hurt the card when it came to actual performance. It did run on the hot side and the small fans (while quiet at normal speeds) got noisy when turned all the way up. The slightly lower overclock and smaller fans did translate into a more power efficient card than the other R9 380 tested. That combined with the smaller design actually makes it a good candidate for a small LAN rig where power is a concern. In a LAN rig the issues with memory overclocking wouldn’t be a concern as well.
So with this specific model we had an additional 2gigs of vRAM giving us a total of 4GB. How did this effect the overall performance of the card? Well in tests like 3DMark Ultra we saw a huge improvement. This leads me to believe that we would see big improvements in 4k testing in game. Sadly even with the improvements at 1440p the increase still wasn’t enough to really justify an additional cost. Normally I would be all for better performance, but in this case we didn’t see an improvement at the 1080p resolution that the R9 380 is best used at and the improvement at higher resolutions isn’t enough to make them playable in most cases.
So where does that leave us? Well this is one of those weird situations where I would actually recommend that you look at the model below this. PowerColor offers a second 380 that has a 2GB frame buffer. This card has an MSRP of $219 but with the other card you could save $20 and pick u a card for $199. This is less than the MSI that I tested as well making it an even better deal. You are giving up a little on cooling performance compared to the MSI, but you are getting a more compact card with the PowerColor. So this is a good option for people who don’t have the room for the ever growing cards like the MSI.
Live Pricing: HERE
