Overall and Final Verdict

It’s kind of hard to believe but it’s been almost two years from our R9 285 ITX review to now. In that time Asus and MSI seem to have dropped from the ITX market and Gigabyte jumped in. On top of that AMD turned things upside down and introduced the Fury Nano. Even still the Sapphire R9 380 4GB ITX is still the go to card. The Fury Nano has all of the performance but is priced as well over twice what it costs to get this card. Things hasn’t changed much, the 380 ITX has the same cooler, styling, and short of the clock speed and memory improvements it’s the same GPU really. That said it didn’t take much to keep the card up to date. The black and silver styling still looks great. The performance is great when testing at 1080p and thanks to the increased vRAM 1440p can hold its own now as well. It’s not the fastest ITX card on the market anymore but it’s the only reasonable option.

I did run into a problem with the cooling. Without touching the fan profile, the 380 ITX ran a lot warmer than I would prefer. Oddly enough it’s not the cooler or the higher clock speed, it seems like the fan profile is just a little less aggressive now. With heat being the biggest issue you can run into with a small form factor build this would be extremely concerning, but with it being such an easy fix I wouldn’t avoid getting it just because of that.

So is this the card for you? Well if you are building a full sized PC or if your SFF build has room for a full sized card I would go that direction. But if you are limited for space the Sapphire R9 380 ITX 4GB is a great option. The 2GB model is at least still currently for sale as well for a little less, if you are only gaming at 1080p that is a great option as well. If you, like me, are running the original 285 ITX from Sapphire though the slightly higher clock speed and higher memory isn’t going to net you enough of an improvement to justify replacing the card. Lucky for me though I’m getting ready to build a new LunchBox build and a refreshed Sapphire ITX is exactly what I need to get my game on at LANs this spring.

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Author Bio
garfi3ld
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.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #37658 12 Feb 2016 18:59
LAN season is about to start and Sapphire has a new ITX card with a little more memory for your LANrig builds!

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