While the world is waiting the introduction of the new generation of graphic cards by both NVIDIA and AMD, the truth is most of us won’t really be buying a 4K/VR ready graphic card. Most of us are happy with a card that is decent 1366 x 768 resolution.
AMD for quite a while has always been a good bet on this part of the market segment. One of their product for this segment is the R7 370 card. What we have with us is the ASUS version of this card, specifically the ASUS Radeon R7 370 STRIX. How does it perform? Let’s find out.
Sparse Packaging
As with other STRIX-based graphic card, a steampunk style mechanical owl is their mascot at the front of the box. Inside, a brown box adorned with the STRIX logo contains the graphic card itself. I was quite surprised that this card was packed in this box without any anti-static bag nor even a bubble wrap.
Included inside is a cross-firex bridge, a quick guide, a STRIX sticker and…well, that’s it. Not even a molex to six pin power adapter nor DVI to VGA adapter included. To say I was surprised was putting it mildly.
Turn Around Bright Eyes
The graphic card looks awesome. The ASUS R7 370 STRIX uses a both a black PCB and a black cooler shroud. The card utilises ASUS’s own DIrectCU II (DCU II) cooler, one that has been proven to perform well and is well liked by gamers.
The heat is dissipated with the help of two large fans that as with all other STRIX cards, are fashioned to look like the eyes of an owl when looked from straight above. The card is 2.5 slots high card. You can access the third PCI card directly under the cooler, but we don’t advice it as it might hamper cooling.
The card is around 22cm long, well the cooler that is. The PCB is around only 2/3rd the length of the shroud and should fit in any medium or even small casings out there.
Due to the length and weight of this card there are no backplate included, nor even needed. At the rear, the card sports two Dual Link DVI connectors, one which also output VGA using an adapter, a single HDMI 1.4a and a Display Port output. A single crossfire connector tab can be found on top of the graphic card.
Under all the shroud, the ASUS R7 370 STRIX packs quite the hardware. 4GB of GDDR5 is clocked at 5600 MHz for high resolution gaming ASUS has overclocked this card quite a bit, with the card now sporting a speed of 1050MHz in gaming mode and 1070 MHz in OC mode. The 256bit bus connection makes sure data is not bottlenecked between the GPU and the VRAM. It has a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160.
The card only needs 150W, hence you only need one six pin GPU power connector to use this card. One awesome thing about this card is that the fan won’t run when the GPU is not under load, leading to a quiet PC.
Gaming Performance
We tested the card to see the performance that it can give us. Using 1366 x 768 monitor, we tried to see how far we can push the card where it can still give us a constant 60FPS, and it did not disappoint.
We tested the card using DotA 2 (High), Battlefield 4 (Medium), Fallout 4 (low), The Witcher 3 (Medium), Hitman 2016 (medium) and Need for Speed 2015 (low). For a budget card, this is quite good especially on Need for Speed which has to render quite a number of shiny stuffs like road reflections and street lights.
Price: RM 899
Processor: AMD Radeon R7
Bus: PCI Express 3.0
Memory: 4GB GDDR5
Clock: 1070 MHz
Interface: DVI X2, HDMI X1, DP X1
Power: 150W
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Value: 9/10
Features: 7/10
Performance: 7/10
Design: 9/10
Usability: 8/10
Verdict: If you want a budget card that can play most games out there
Total Score: 8.0/10
