Radeon R9 380X 

Gaming noise is very good, better than with most graphics cards on the market.

While everything runs completely stable at 1638 MHz, the card immediately crashes with just an additional 1 MHz, no matter whether running a game or not.

ASUS is using their own rebranded voltage controller, which probably supports voltage control and monitoring through ASUS software.

If you look at our price/performance graphs, you will find pretty much every competing board offering a similar or better deal.

And finally we have the GTX 970, which is a well-tested, proven, and extremely well-supported product by NVIDIA, with 30% more performance than the 380X at about 30% higher pricing ($290).

You should also be able to get decent framerates at 1440p if you are willing to sacrifice some details.

I did notice that memory overclocking seems to hit a wall at 1638 MHz, though, as soon as you increase clocks by another MHz, which has the card go to a black screen, suggesting an issue with how the memory chip timings are configured and not properly recalculated at higher clocks.

4 GB is the standard memory amount for this SKU, and there won't be a 2 GB variant.

Memory overclocking seems to be limited by the Elpida memory chips or their settings in AMD's VBIOS.

Overall, the R9 380X is roughly just as fast as the R9 280X, with the ASUS overclocked variant gaining a few extra percentage points over it.

The highlight here is definitely the excellent cooler with its good fan settings, but the overclock out of the box helps as well.

At around 10%, overclocking performance is roughly as expected.

During gaming, the fan ramps up slightly, but ends up at a very quiet 29 dBA, which is quieter than most competing cards from AMD (I'm thinking of the R9 280X and R9 290).

57°C in idle might sound high at first, but you have to consider that the card turns its fans off in idle and light gaming, which results in a completely noise-free experience for desktop work and media playback.