MSI R7 370 GAMING 2G Review - PAGE 1

Over the last few months, there has been a proliferation of rumors about the new AMD cards, resulting in wild speculations and a great deal of confusion. Then, over the last few weeks we got the usual wave of leaks including product diagrams, specifications, pictures, and performance benchmarks. The one thing that everyone seemed to agree upon was the fact that the R7 and R9 300 series cards from AMD will probably consist of a rebrand - or refresh, depending on where you stand - of previously released products, with some tweaks and added features to justify the new naming scheme.

On Tuesday June 16th, AMD finally introduced its Radeon 300 series video cards and brought the online rumor mill to rest. The highlights of the live stream were the Fiji-based Fury cards, which bring to the table an all-new architecture and HBM (High Bandwidth Memory). There wasn't much talk however about the specifications of the R7 and R9 300 series, which seemed a bit odd since the real fight for marketshares happens in the mid-range and entry-level segments, where most sales tend to happen.

Today I will be looking at the MSI R7 370 Gaming 2G, which comes with 2GB of RAM, or half the memory available for the other existing R7 370 variant. The R7 370, together with the R7 360, is positioned as an entry level card in the new AMD product stack and designed for 1080p gaming, particularly for titles like not-so-graphically-demanding online games. MSI fit the card with its new Twin Frozr V cooling solution and Military Class 4 components, which is very nice thing to see at the $159.99 MSRP price point. The MSI R7 370 Gaming 2G comes with 1024 Stream processors across 16 compute units, 32 ROPs and 64 TMUs. In terms of memory, we got 2GB GDDR5 running at 1425MHz on a 256-bit interface for a total 182.4 GB/s bandwidth. Seems pretty familiar isn't it? We are basically looking at the successor of the Radeon 7850 and R7 265, with a bump in the core clocks and memory. Will the clock boost and custom design give this Trinidad based card any extra edge in terms of gaming performance?

Specifications:

NOTE: The above is a revised version of the specifications listed on the AMD website @ http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/desktop/r7. MSI did not provide a final spec sheet so I did my best to piece one together for the card at hand.