Card Layout and Photos
While the model name has changed from the original R9 285 that I took a look at and the memory capacity has increased from 2 gigs to 4 gigs from the original R9 380 ITX card, the R9 380 ITX 4GB looks exactly the same as the two previous models. This is partially because the R9 380 as a whole is actually a carry over from the R9 285, only with a higher clock speed. This card though has actually bumped that clocks speed up even farther to 1GHz and has doubled the memory. The design still has the same single large fan design. The fan shroud was and still is one of the coolest looking Sapphire cards as well with the silver and black theme. What is really unique though is how the fan shroud curves in around the fan to help keep fan noise down and get the best possible airflow.
The card and cooler is of course just over 6 inches long to keep it in that ITX form factor. That means that the card will fit anywhere that has the length of an ITX motherboard. There is a little additional height with about a half inch of PCB and fan shroud up above the top of the PCI slot cover. I didn’t have any fitment issues with the original and it was the same size, but it is something to keep in mind, especially when working with small form factor builds.
The cooling configuration consists of four heatpipes sandwiched between the thick heatsink and a contact plate that touches the GPU, memory, and power circuitry to pull all of the heat out and away from the PCB. The heatpipes help pull the heat out to the far ends of the heatsink but the meat of the cooling is still done in the center under the large fan. The fan blows down over the heatsink fins and the out the front and rear of the card. The design is basically a combination of a reference card and a normal aftermarket cooler on a card. This means there is more space for heatsink without the recessed fan design but the fan pushes down and also out with the heatsink rising up on both sides of the fan. With heat being the biggest concern in a small form factor build, especially a gaming LAN rig, I will take all the cooling that Sapphire can pack in.
The end of the card does tell us a few things. For one we can see that the heatsink takes up the entire space between the PCB and the fan shroud. Also facing out the rear is the power connection. Like previous Sapphire ITX models the 380 ITX 4GB requires a single 8-pin power connection. To make enough room for the cooling the connection is flipped around backwards with the clip on the PCB side with the PCB notched like a lot of the manufactures have been doing recently.
With the R9 380 ITX being a small card you would think that they have the same amount of space on the back like a full sized card. The difference though is this card actually needs all of the vent space is can get on the back to help push all of the warm air out of the back of your small form factor case. That means the vent on the rear of the card takes up a full slot, and even more. They still managed to pack in a lot of connection options though. You have a DVI connection, a full sized HDMI, and two Mini-DisplayPort connections. This gives you up to four monitors before daisy chaining on the DisplayPorts and people with older monitors will be happy to see DVI and VGA with an adapter are still options. Sapphire even packed small cutouts in between each connection to get the most airflow possible.
The back of the card gives us a good look at the good looking all black PCB. In addition, here we can better see that Sapphire used up every square inch of the PCB to fit the 380 into this form factor. There are a few mounting screws on the back that stick out in addition to a few PCB mounted thing like what looks to be a power choke down in the bottom right corner that stick out slightly but overall there shouldn’t be any clearance issues with the 380 ITX on the back.
