 With the continuing trend of more capable GPUs and higher resolution monitors falling in price, gaming at 1440p is becoming an attractive option for people who want to go beyond the now standard 1080p experience. But don't want to fork out tons of cash for a 4K setup. With that in mind, today we're looking at AMD's new Radeon R9 380X, an upper mid-range card squarely focused on the 1440p market. How does it stack up to the competition in terms of performance and value? Stay tuned to find out, and if you guys like the video once you're done, hit that like button up. Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great performance with very low noise. Click the link in the video description to learn more. Let's start off by having a look at the important specs of our 380X. Like its slightly cheaper little brother, the R9 380, the 380X features a Tonga GPU, but packs more stream processors for a performance boost. You also get a fairly standard allocation of 4GB of GDDR5 memory, a 256-bit memory interface, and at least a 970MHz core clock with support for DirectX 12, Vulkan, and Mantle APIs. Our review sample is a Sapphire Nitro Edition featuring a 70MHz out-of-the-box overclock, a dual-fan open-aired cooler, and a plastic backplate. Reference cards aren't available quite yet, but you'll get a similar look to other recent-gen Radeon cards with a black shroud and blower-style fan. You'll need two 6-pin PCI Express power connectors to give your card enough juice to properly run as well. For testing, we compared the 380X to a number of other mid-range to high-end-ish cards from an AMD to Nvidia standpoint, excluding the GTX 980 Ti and the R9 Fury series, as those cards are priced well above the target market for the 380X. We used our standard test bench inside of a Cooler Master MasterCase Pro 5. You can see the specs of the test bench here on the screen. So let's have a quick look at the results. Our first test was to check the power draw and temperatures at load. The 380X performed about exactly where we expected it, smack in the middle of the AMD product stack, at 288 watts. Its power draw is about 70 watts higher than its closest competitor on the Nvidia side, the GTX 960, but is still by no means unreasonable. The GPU stayed at a respectable 69 degrees Celsius, so you shouldn't have to worry too much about temperatures north of the 80 degree kind of mark that we've been having some issues with with the R9 290 and 390 series. For our game benchmarks, we started off with the notoriously resource-hungry Crysis 3 running at 1440p on the very high preset with FXAA enabled. Here we saw the 380X push 34 frames per second, beating out its closest competitor on the Nvidia side, the GTX 960, by 6 FPS. Moving on to Far Cry 4 at ultra settings at 1440p, the 380X mustered 39 frames per second, beating out the GTX 960 by 4 FPS. And in Tomb Raider, at the same resolution and ultimate settings, we got 49 frames per second compared to the 40 from the 960. But while these frame rates are certainly playable, they may not be quite as smooth as you'd like, so we put the 380X through our suite of games again, but this time turned the graphics down to one step below the maximum here. We saw a pretty substantial improvement, especially in Tomb Raider and Crysis 3, with the 380X now pushing 75 and 54 FPS respectively. Far Cry 4 saw a more modest yet still noticeable bump at 44 FPS. But just because this is a 1440p focused card doesn't mean that's what you have to use it for. If you're rocking a 1080p monitor and want to say just max out your games, you can do so. So we did, and the 380X managed between about 53 and 70 FPS overall. But what about value? The aforementioned performance gain over the 960 does come at a cost. At the time of this video, the cheapest GTX 960 on Newegg cost $55 less than the cheapest 380X due to sales prices. Yes, but you'd normally be looking at a closer to $25 to $30 Delta. So does the 380X make sense from a value for money perspective? Our Sapphire 380X is selling on Newegg for $230 while you can pick up the same ASUS Strix GTX 960 that we used for $210. Looking at the graph, you can see a slight but not earth shattering advantage for the 380X in terms of dollars per frame at 1440p, which may make the $20 premium a worthwhile investment. Unfortunately, we didn't have an R9 380 non-X to test against, but independent testing that we have seen has shown that the X edition only gives you a boost of 2 to 3 FPS in many cases. So the plain vanilla 380 may be a better choice if you don't care about squeezing every last frame from your wallet, including every last dollar. So our conclusion is that while the 380X doesn't change the game in the $200 to $250ish price point, it's still a solid entry for AMD for those who want to game at 1440p with the settings cranked to high, or those who want to get close to that 60 FPS holy grail at 1080p with everything cranked up. If you really want to max out games at 1440p though, and approach 60 FPS, spending the extra $70 to $100 on a GTX 970 or R9 390 might have been a wise decision if you have the extra cash. UpDesk has a wide range of powered standing desks available on updesk.com. What almost all of them have in common is the high quality dual motor electronically controlled height adjust system that lets you either manually raise or lower the desktop surface, or pre-program three different heights for sit, stand, or maybe a ride on a stationary bike or a walk on a treadmill. The one I've been using since UpDesk equipped it our office is the large sized squared up. It's been a great solution for me due to needing to sit at a corner desk, and I actively use the different profile modes as I have back problems so being able to rotate between sitting and standing is great. So whether you're trying to just get in the habit of shifting positions periodically, or if you want to get some real health benefits out of your new desk by putting a treadmill or stationary bike under it, check out UpDesk over at updesk.com slash Linus. It's linked in the video description down below. Thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon, buying a cool t-shirt like this one, or the direct monthly contribution through the forum. Now that you're done doing all that kind of stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so look here and look no further for part one of the mineral oil build. If you guys haven't seen that yet, you probably have, but if you haven't, it's awesome.