AMD thinks its Radeon R7 370 is the right fit for a large swath of its customers. Our Best Graphics Cards For The Money column would agree. The 370 is one of our picks around the $150 level. The XFX’s R7 370 2GB Black Edition is built on AMD’s Trinidad GPU. It is an affordable graphics card designed to present enough functionality for 1920 x 1080 at a price point low enough that almost anyone can justify.
The R7 370 characterizes 1024 shaders, 64 texture units and 32 ROPs. It operates at a base clock rate of 975-MHz, and includes either 2-GB or 4-GB of GDDR5 memory on an aggregate 256 bit bus. The overclocked effectuation it is being shown today, comes with 2-GB of GDDR5 at 5.8 GT/s and a GPU tuned to 1040MHz GPU.
The shroud is a basic black plastic with a matte finish, and the fans are a slightly glossier finish with reflective XFX logo stickers covering the centers. There’s no other color to be found, and the shroud is not stylized in a specially fancy way. XFX even builds the card on a black PCB to keep the aesthetic consistent.
The company uses what it calls Ghost Thermal 3.0 technology, by characterizing a floating, open-air design. Except where it contacts the GPU, the heat sink is raised above the components on the card. XFX says this performs superior cooling by allowing air to pass freely through the horizontal aluminum fins, though it also leaves the memory modules and VRMs with no direct contact, relying on air passing directly over them for cooling.
The dual slot cooling solution is little narrower than some of the other cards tested lately. XFX’s board does not feel very heavy. Still, at 508g, you would not call it light. The Radeon R7 370 Black Edition requires one six-pin power connector, which sticks out the back of the card rather than out its top. It is oriented so that the locking tab faces out, making it easier to remove.
Conclusion
R7 370 lands between the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 950 in functionality, but the price point is too high.