Not a fan of Nvidia cards? Maybe this AMD card might convince you to jump ship.

Finally AMD is making a move with their latest line of graphics cards to compete with Nvidia’s new cards, boasting support for DirectX12 games and supporting new features such as the Asynchronous Shaders, Frame Rate Target Control (FRTC), and Virtual Super Resolution (VSR) for the best graphics quality and power efficiency. But will it be enough to convince gamers to make the switch?

Before starting with the review, let’s take a look at the Strix R7 370:

• Graphics Engine: AMD Radeon R7 370
• Bus Standard: PCI Express 3.0
• OpenGL: OpenGL®4.4
• Video Memory: GDDR5 4GB
• Engine Clock
  • 1070 MHz (OC Mode)
  • 1050 MHz (Gaming Mode)
• Memory Clock: 5600 MHz
• Memory Interface: 256-bit
• Resolution: DVI Max Resolution : 2560×1600
• Interface
  • DVI Output : Yes x 1 (Native) (DVI-I), Yes x 1 (Native) (DVI-D)
  • HDMI Output : Yes x 1 (Native)
  • Display Port : Yes x 1 (Native) (Regular DP)
  • HDCP Support : Yes
• Power Consumption: up to 150W1 additional 6 pin PCIe power required

As for the graphic card’s design, Asus is serious as usual in giving a distinct feel to their Strix line; edgy and aggressive design with an appearance of a fierce owl. The R7 370 is initially clocked at 1050 MHz and it has an Overclock profile that can be tweak to 1070 MHz. It also has 4GB GDDR5 memory but it won’t have the High Bandwidth Memory feature which improves power efficiency.

The R7 370 has a dual fan set up to optimize in cooling the graphic card, it also has two large 8mm heatpipes connected straight to the GPU for improve heat dissipation. The card also features the DirectCU II cooler system where the fans will stop spinning when the graphic card is performing light workloads and the fans will only be activated when the GPU temperature reaches a certain level, this feature can be useful if you want a 0db noise on your PC, though the twin fans does not emit much noise when running, you wouldn’t even notice it running. The included ASUS GPU Tweak II software allows you to adjust your GPU’s performance in the way you wanted, you can set a certain temperature to activate the GPU fans when in silent mode or boost its performance to provide a better framerate on your game by tweaking its GPU clock, voltage and fan speed with OC mode or even make your game client a priority in the GPU load by activating Game Booster which lets your defrag your system memory and even turn off and Windows services that are less priority.

As for performance, we tested the R7 370 with GPU benchmark software and several high-end games and light games to see how it fares well. 3D Mark gave this a great score in different graphics test. We also tested the Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn benchmark and the result gave the R7 370 a high score in the highest setting and 1080p resolution. When tested on Battlefield 4 on Ultra settings, it managed to run at around 35 frames per second, but when the R7 370 was set to overclock mode (at 1070 MHz), it managed to get a boost of an additional 5 frames per second, making it at 40 FPS, though you can still increase the clock speed up to 1120 MHZ if desired to further improved the initial framerate with around 15% improvement. As for other games such as The Legend of Korra and Dungeon Siege 3 that does not require a powerful GPU to run, the R7 370 managed to maintain a 60 FPS during the whole game test, and the card was not set in overclock mode. When using the GPU, temperature runs around 50-60 degrees Celsius in some games and could reach peak range at 70 degrees when running a high-end game in the highest settings.

To sum it all up, the Asus Strix R7 370 is a great mid-range graphic card with a great cooling system to keep it in good shape even when the GPU is stressed with large load in high-end games. Although if competed with Nvidia cards which has exclusive graphical features that AMD cards does not support and could showcase its full potential. However the R7 370 can still stand up on its own as a suitable card for online games such as MOBA and MMORPGs and can still provide good graphical performance on action RPGs on 1080p resolution. So if you want a card that is better than entry-level rigs but not enough to invest for the more expensive high-level components, you can choose the R7 370.