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AMD Launches Radeon R9 380X, Fastest GPU Under $250 (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Although AMD's mid-range GPU line-up has been relatively strong for a while now, the company is launching the new Radeon R9 380X today with the goal of taking down competing graphics cards like NVIDIA's popular GeForce GTX 960. The Radeon R9 380X has a fully-functional AMD Tonga GPU with all 32 compute units / 2048 shader processors enabled. AMD's reference specifications call for 970MHz+ engine clock with 4GB of 1425MHz GDDR5 memory (5.7 Gbps effective). Typical board power is 190W and cards require a pair of supplemental 6-pin power feeds. The vast majority of the Radeon R9 380X cards that will hit the market, however, will likely be custom models that are factory overlcocked and look nothing like AMD's reference design. The Radeon R9 380X, or more specifically the factory overclocked Sapphire Nitro R9 380X tested, performed significantly better than AMD's Radeon R9 285 or NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 960 across the board. The 380X, however, could not catch more powerful and more expensive cards like the GeForce GTX 970. Regardless, the Radeon R9 380X is easily the fastest graphics card on the market right now, under $250.
You're missing the entire point here.
nVidia is intentionally segmenting THEIR customers into consumer and professional grade, byt INTENTIONALLY LIMITING compute functionality of consumer grade products.
ATI(or AMD if you want to maintain the fiction) segments them in a similar fashion as well, however they do no limit compute functionality and consumer grade cards.
In either case you're missing out on ECC memories, so I guess it's down to how important it is that your results are as accurate as possible. So, in crypto currency it probably doesn't matter, but being realistic here bitcoin the only winner so far and it's going to take a helluvalot of 7870s to be even slightly useful.
Lastly, this also show that ATI does NOT in FACT have superior hardware in that a card of a similar generation, but of much lower end is capable of running a particular game meanwhile it takes a relatively high end ATI card. Add to this fact that ATI has added auxiliary space heating functionality to ALL of their offerings, along with AMD parent products. Right here, now, that's a handy feature to have, but it won't be in a few months again.
Typical idle draw is around 20W. Much like a CPU, the GPU underclocks and undervolts when idle so as to reduce heat and power requirements.