Unboxing and Overview
Starting with the box of course MSI have a very attractive design here with a simple Red and Black colour scheme featuring some standout items about the card such as the fact this has 4GB of GDDR5 memory, that this is the ‘OC” edition and there is also their trademark Dragon logo with a PCB tracer layout embossed onto the box.
Moving onto to the back of the box it is crammed full of information and features about the card such as the new design TORX fans which boast a cutting edge design and superior cooling, the SuperSP heatpipes which are specially designed for better heat dispersion and MSI has added a Zero Frozr function to this card so at idle load the fans will not spin keeping noise down.
The inner box is quite plain and is all black with a glossy MSI Gaming G Series logo in the centre
Inside we find and disc with the Catalyst 15.2 WHQL driver, MSI Kombustor utility (Which we will use for temp testing), MSI gaming app, MSI Afterburner, XSplit Gamecaster, Google Chrome and even a copy of Norton Internet Security, quite alot of software bundled on this disc.
In addition to that we get a DVI to VGA adaptor and a quick user guide for installation.
The GPU itself is well protected and sits in a good sized anti-static bag in an anti-static foam cutout with the box we seen above in top of it for good protection during shipping.
After we’ve taken the GPU out we can see that MSI have really put alot of work into the looks of this cooler with a great colour scheme and nice accents over the card and of course a nice little information sticker telling you to remove it before gaming and not to panic if the fans don’t start spinning right away after installation.
Now this is the side you will see most of the time and it looks good……
With the MSI logo lighting up white (although it’s effects can be changed or turned off via MSI’s gaming app) and the nice heatpipe arrangement this is a very good looking card and only requires 2x 6-pin PCIe power connectors which are rotated so the clip is actually on the top so you don’t squash your fingers when trying to remove the cables.
Now I’m not really sure what to say here except this is a sexy looking backplate, it’s has a quality finish and has adequate ventilation thanks to the multiple air holes.
This are the sides you will rarely see but it still looks good and looking at the rear of the card we can see good spacing between the backplate and PCB along with the fins of the heatsink being nice and straight, good quality control here.
The I/O ports on the R9 380 gives you plenty of functionality with there being a DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI 1.4 and DP 1.2 ports and some nice red dust covers over them for protection.
Onto the specs:
Here are they are as read by GPU-Z:
The MSI Gaming OC R9 380 has 1792 stream processors with a GPU clock of 980Mhz in gaming mode (1000Mhz in OC mode) and 4096MB of SK-Hynix GDDR5 clocked at 1425Mhz (5700Mhz effective) on a 256-bit bus.
This GPU uses AMD’s GCN 1.2 architecture which features better tessellation and colour compression over the previous version (GCN 1.1).
