XFX releases another 300 series card that uses much older technology
After covering the XFX R7 260 Core Edition, I was hoping that the next rung up on the GPU ladder would contain something more exciting.
The XFX R7 370 2gb Double Dissipation Black Edition is XFX’s pre-overclocked offering, and costs about £30 more than the R7 360. For that extra dosh you not only get a bigger dual fan cooler, but also the GPU core has more shaders, TMUs, ROPs, and critically a 256-bit memory bus with bags more bandwidth.
And being the Black Edition, this one has also been factory tweaked with an extra 75MHz on the GPU clock, now 1040MHz, and 50MHz on the baseline GDDR5 clock, giving the quad pumped equivalent of 5800MHz. Therefore, for just another £30 you get almost a 50% bump in GPU power over the R7 360, making this a better value option.
Most of this extra grunt comes from the extra memory bandwidth rather than the clock speeds or shaders, and this translates well for those wishing to run games at resolutions above 1080p or multiple panels using Eyefinity mode.
The card supports four displays from the available outputs, though the lack of HDMI 2.0 does mean you'll only get 4K at 60Hz through DisplayPort.
However, there are a few more important skeletons in this closet that I’m duty-bound to pull out and parade, in much the fashion as I’ve done with R7 360 series cards.
Like that card, or specifically all R7 360 cards, this one is built on a rebadged GPU – one that went by the name Pitcairn Pro, before it was the Curaçao Pro, and is-now calling itself Trinidad Pro, but has an identically sized die with the same number of transistors fabricated at the identical 28nm scale process.
That GPU’s origins are the OEM Radeon HD 7850 that appeared in 2012, when it supported DX 11.2. These days, it’s sold as DX12 compliant, but that’s DX12 (11_1) and not DX12 (12_1) as delivered by AMD cards that support GCN 1.1 and 1.2.
Being only GCN 1.0, it also doesn’t support TrueAudio, though it supports the Mantle and Vulkan APIs, should you be interested in those.
I’m mentioning this because I think it’s important that you understand what you’re buying isn’t the cutting edge of AMD video technology. However, I'll also point out that this is still decent video technology that's fine for general gaming.
What the benchmarking reveals are numbers that are very much in line to what I would have expected from an R7 270 last year, and ironically 3DMark kept on identifying this one as its predecessor when I ran its tests.
What’s also important to realise is that pre-overclocked cards also have less headroom for user tweaking, as this technology is going about as fast as it’s ever likely to in this configuration.
On a more positive note, the power demands of this layout allows it to operate with only a single PCIe six-pin power line, because everything above this from AMD needs two or at least a single eight-pin. Being able to swap video card without having to consider a PSU upgrade is always a good thing. This specification should work with a 500W PSU, covering the majority of PCs built for gaming.
The big issue for the XFX R7 370 Black Edition isn’t the cheaper cards below it, but the large number of more powerful ones sat in the channel just above its cost.
There's a dearth of R9 285 cards that can be found for a tenner more, which my benchmarks demonstrate are another 40% quicker than the plucky R7 370 series. And confusingly, they’re also fully GCN 1.2 compliant, even though they launched over a year ago.
The bottom line on this card is that if you wanted to buy an R7 270 last year but didn’t, then you needn’t worry that they’re disappearing from the shelves.
What concerns me is that there appears to be an expanding hole in the AMD range between cards like this one and the Fury series, which is being filled by older R9 stock.
However this is fixed, I just hope for AMD and XFX’s sake that this GPU and memory combination doesn’t return next year as the R7 470. Mark Pickavance
A nice card but ultimately rehashed GPU technology.