AMD R9 380X leaked — threatens NVIDIA GTX960 and GTX970

AMD’s current line-up has a large gap between the R9 380 and R9 390 if we compare from the price point, but the gap will be filled with the upcoming AMD R9 380X that is said to feature the full Tonga chip. The R9 285 is the first card from AMD that used the Tonga chip but it has only 1792 stream processors enabled, while the new R9 380X is said to sport 2048 stream processors which made me wonder how true are the old rumors suggesting that the full Tonga chip actually packs roughly 2240 stream processors, but let’s wait until the real card hit the market.

The Tonga GPU apparently  is based on AMD’s Graphics Core Next 1.2 architecture so it comes with all the features seen in the Radeon R9 285/R9 380 graphics card. The R9 380X said to target the USD 250 price point which will place it somewhere between the NVIDIA GTX 960 and NVIDIA GTX 970. If this rumor is true, then the AMD R9 380X might take the crown in that price range, especially in terms of price to performance ratio.

The picture you see above is the XFX Radeon R9 380X that will feature a new Double Dissipation cooler with four 8mm copper heatpipes and two easily removable 100mm fans. Specifications of the card are scarce, but the R9 380X might be a graphics card with a Tonga XT GPU, packing 32 Compute Units, for a total of 2048 Stream Processors, 128 TMUs, 32 ROPs and either 3GB or 6GB of GDDR5 memory fed through a 384-bit memory interface.

As AMD has quietly released the AMD R7 370X only for the China market right now, I hope the R9 380X will be available worldwide soon with a decent price tag.

Pokdepinion : The AMD R9 285 has proved to be THE small form factor card version for ITX system, so an ITX card based on the R9 380X would be very interesting, as it is not only capable of closing the gap between the R9 380 and R9 390 but also would be the second fastest ITX from AMD.