So last week we had our first peak at the kind of new R9 380. Well it just so happens that card was only a 2GB model. Lucky for us PowerColor sent over their PCS+ R9 380 and it has a 4GB frame buffer. So today I’m going to check out the card from PowerColor and see what they have going on and along with that we can see if having the additional frame buffer is worth it in our benchmark suite. With these cards not exactly being focused towards higher resolution gameplay I’m not sure if we will see too much at 1080p but given the 1440p numbers we saw before I bet we see some improvement there!

Product Name: PowerColor PCS+ R9 380

Review Sample Provided by: PowerColor

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Amazon Link: HERE

Packaging

The box for the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 has the now almost standard red and black theme though to be fair PowerColor has been using it for a long time. The front has a large PCS+ logo in a metallic finish with the model name below it. Down along the bottom we have a little information on the card, namely the 4GB frame buffer as the other icons all represent features found on all AMD cards. I would love to see them slip in a photo of the card on the cover as well rather than the circle design they went with. On the back we have a little more information on the card. They talk about AMD features like FreeSync as well as the PCS+ R9 380’s overclocking ability and the coolers 15% temperature decrease and 10% airflow increase. They did a nice job of including a list of system requirements and power requirements at least. There wasn’t a photo of the card beyond a tiny blown up drawing of the cards cooler, there also wasn’t any specific information or specifications on the card. This was weird to me because from what I can tell PowerColor only has the one 4GB R9 380 but they must be leaving room for additional models in the future.

Inside the card is wrapped up in a static protective bag and then it sits in a cardboard tray. Up under that tray is the documentation and normally we would find accessories. So you get a small user manual and a driver disk, oddly enough they don’t include a DVI to VGA adapter or power adapters like most cards.

Card Layout and Photos

The PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 is an interesting looking card. For the most part a lot of the cards tend to all look the same but I can say for sure that this card looks nothing like them. Just the two fans alone are enough to set it apart. They seem to be missing every other fan blade but if you look closely the second blade is there but small and tucked up inside a knock out of the larger fan blades. The blades don’t look attached to a circle in the center as well, the middle of the fans actually looks to be part of the fan blades. The fan shroud is a little different as well. As regular readers might know I love metal fan shrouds and this card does have one. PowerColor stamped it out of steel and then finished it in a textured black with red stripes. By stamping the shroud out of metal they were able to do a design much closer to the plastic shrouds but with a little stronger design. The black and red theme isn’t different but the opening between the two fans is. Additionally the whole design is noticeably smaller in both height and width compared to the MSI 380. Next to each other they look like completely different GPUs, the PCS+ 380 is a lot more likely to fit in your small builds.

For a card that is relatively small I was surprised that PowerColor decided to pack the heatpipes in up under the fan shroud. In fact the heatsink is actually only about 2 and a half inches tall, the rest of the space under the shroud is taken up by the heatpipes. Given the smaller fans the small heatsink is about the right size for the fans though. The two fans blow the air down through the heatsink and across the PCB. From there the air does vent out every edge of the card. This means the warmed air will vent into your case but that is expected for cards with aftermarket coolers.

For power the PCS+ 380 needs two six pin connections to get everything powered up. This is the same as seen on other R9 380’s so no surprise there. The connectors are facing the normal direction and even though the fan shroud gets kind of close there is more than enough room to get your finger in there and unhook the cables.

The R9 380 doesn’t have a traditional Crossfire bridge, like the R9 290 they actually run the Crossfire through the PCI slot.

For display connections the PCS+ has the same options that the MSI 380 had as well. You get two DVI connections as well as a DisplayPort and HDMI both full sized. There is a small vent in the second slot as well for a little of the warm air from the card to vent. Most cards these days are going away from the dual DVI connections and moving to more DisplayPort connections so I’m always happy to see the dual DVIs, I know a lot of people haven’t even moved to HDMI monitors let alone DisplayPort.

The back of the PCS+ R9 380 had a stamped steel backplate. This helps with the rigity of the card and prevent the PCB from bending over time but they are known for hurting temps. To help with that PowerColor did vent part of the backplate. The MSI 380 had a backplate as well but it was machined aluminum, its vents were on the end towards the power circuity, I’m curious if the location on this card will help or hurt cooling. The backplate also has the serial number and model number on it to make it easier to find those if you ever have to RMA. They also included the R9 380 logo on the backplate although I would have preferred the logo to be flipped around so that you can see it when the card is installed.

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Synthetic Benchmarks

To start off my testing I ran the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 through our standard synthetic benchmark suite. While these results don’t really have a correlation with in game performance they are still a great way to compare card to card. In this case I was really curious if the PowerColor would see an improvement compared to the MSI R9 380 because the PowerColor has 4 gigs of memory where the MSI only had 2 gigs. In 3DMark on the performance setting the results were nearly the same. The same goes for the 1440p Extreme setting. However when we tested at 4K the PowerColor really pulled ahead. In fact it was surprisingly close to the GTX 980 on the Ultra setting as well. In both of the Unigine benchmarks the results between the two cards were basically the same leaving the PowerColor 380 between the GTX 770 and the GTX960 just like we saw previously.

In-Game Benchmarks

So when we get into in game benchmarks we can finally see exactly how well the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 will perform for you in game. For our testing I tested the card in 9 different games at 1440 and 8 at 1080p (Shadow at Mordor won’t let me force 1080p on our 1440p monitor). All of the games were set at their highest settings for all of the testing to get a worse case scenario. When breaking the card down by our three ratings (less than 30 FPS, Over 30 FPS, and Over 60FPS) for each game we can get an idea of if you can run the game at max settings out of the box and get the sweet spot frame rate (60 or above), if you might need to adjust the settings to hit the sweet spot but still playable (Above 30), or if the game is unplayable (under 30 FSP) we can get an idea of what to expect. Just like the MSI the PowerColor 380 ended up with 5/8 of the 1080p results in the playable but could use some setting tweaks and the other 3/8 were perfectly playable at max settings.

At 1440p I was expecting to see a little bit of an improvement in performance for the 4GB PowerColor but when looking at our rankings you can’t see it. The results were 3/3/3 with three games in each rating. When looking at the results I could still see an obvious increase in performance though so I averaged out the results to see the overall improvement. In the end (as you can see below) the PowerColor did have nearly a 2FPS improvement here. This is even better considering the MSI has a slightly higher boost clock speed. Is it worth? Well we will dig into that later when we talk about how much the cards cost.

Powercolor 380

1080p Average 63.48875

1440p Average 44.11777

MSI 380

1080p Average 64.16

1440p Average 42.671111

Compute Performance

As I said in the MSI R9 380 review, I doubt people are picking up R9 380’s for their compute power. But I did still run the PowerColor through our Compute benchmarks in Folding @ Home. This will help give users considering adding one to their folding array they can see how it performs and as well as those of you who do some video editing on the side. The higher memory capacity of the PowerColor makes no difference here so the MSI did have a slight lead with its slight overclock advantage. That said in the single precision testing the 380’s performed great in comparison to the GTX 780. In the double precision testing the GTX 780 dominated but the 380’s did get respectably close to the gimped GTX 980.

Cooling, Noise, and Power

Considering how close the performance between the two R9 380’s has been it makes this section even more important. In this section we get to take a look at noise and temperature performance of the aftermarket coolers. Those coolers are one of the big factors in what sets each card apart. In this case I was also curious if the memory and overclock differences would play any part in power usage as well. So to start off I took a look at our power testing. I recorded idle numbers with our Kill A Watt then ran the 380 through the Heaven Benchmark 4.0 and noted the peak wattage the whole testbench pulled. This does include our 6 core testbench and water cooling so you can expect slightly lower numbers on a more normal build. So surprisingly the MSI 380 pulled 390 watts at peak load where the PowerColor pulled 379. This was actually less than our overclocked R9 285 even putting the PowerColor down with R9 270X’s and GTX 760’s.

For noise testing I ran through three decibel tests. Once with the fans turned up to 100% for a worse case benchmark, once at 50% for a real world number, and then at idle. Like a lot of the cards recently the PowerColor R9 380 turns off its fans at idle. At 100% fan speed the PowerColor was noisier than the MSI 380 by a little over three decibels putting it up in the top half of the cards we have tested in the past. I’m guessing the smaller fans on the PowerColor have a higher max speed to make up for their size. At the more realistic 50% fan speed test the two cards were very close with the PowerColor actually being quieter.

As we saw in the last test if the PowerColor R9 380 is cranked up it can get noisy so it is important for it to be able to control its temperatures without having to reach 100% fan speed. So to test the cooling performance I ran the card in Heaven Benchmark 4.0 again, this time letting it run until the temperatures leveled off. At 73 degrees this card does run noticeably warmer than the average card with aftermarket cooling, in fact it was up close to what the reference cards are running. Given the smaller heatsink and smaller fans I should have seen it coming. If you have a case that would have issues with tall cards this might be the best option still though.

Overclocking

Before finishing up my testing I did want to see just how well the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 would overclock as well. To do this I broke down the overclocking into three sections, the GPU clock, Memory clock, and then both together. This way I could get my peak overclocks on each and then see if the card could handle them together. Overclocking the GPU clocks went identical with the MSI 380, on both cards I saw 1130MHz. But when it came to memory overclocking I tried to cut out a few of my earlier overclocks knowing how the other 380 performed but I was surprised to run into a wall when testing above 6700MHz. Normally when overclocking memory I will see some artifacts when I push it past its limit or worse case a drive crash. This time around though the PowerColor would actually turn off the PC completely, no artifacts, no drive crash, no bluescreen even. I would be especially careful overclocking the PCS+ R9 380 on the memory side because of this. Not having memory overclocks isn’t really much of a loss anyhow, almost all of the improvements come from a good GPU clock speed bump.

So with my two overclocks I did try to run them together but I had a driver crash. Given the issues with the memory before I went ahead and bumped that down a notch and did the same for the GPU clock. Once I did that I was able to benchmark the card successfully. In the end the MSI overclocked better and saw a slightly higher FPS result as well. The PowerColor overclocked well on the GPU side but there is clearly issues with pushing the memory. 

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

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.