ASUS R9-370 2GB Graphics Card

The current build makes progress, and I continue to take my time and reflect on life, the universe and everything as I assemble the computer. I moved the wiring somewhat for the space where the graphics card will sit, that being PCI Express slot one, the 16x slot on the Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 motherboard.

There is only one PCIEX16 slot on the motherboard, even if the other looks the same, that one, in the lower part of the photo, is a PCIEX4 slot. The graphics card "of choice" is the ASUS R9-370 Radeon, with 2GB GDDR5 memory. I say that as the current retail environment for new and used graphics cards in general is horrific, world shortage of supply, scalpers and of course, crypto currency mining has driven up prices to ridiculous levels. I was fortunate to buy this card for about 50% of the going rate.

The card takes one six pin power plug, which augments the 75 watts of the PCI Express slot. At peak power the card can draw 150 watts and of course produce a lot of heat. I run an R9-270 on my gaming machine, which allows me to play my games at 1080P with good frame rate, and the average G3D mark is 4260 with the Curacao (Volcanic Islands) Processor, 1280 cores and 256 bit bus width. It isn't the fastest graphics card around by a large margin, but it gets the job done.

This R9-370 is surprisingly similar, but has a Trinidad (Pirate Islands) Processor, same cores, same memory, same bus width and what appears to be a slight tweak to the base clock (925 MHz versus 900 MHz) and boost clock (975 MHz versus 925 MHz) resulting in a marginal increase in performance and heat generation. It is eight year old technology that was re-released six years ago with a bigger model number, a common and sinister habit of the graphics card industry. 

The gaming community affectionately calls this type of hardware a potato.

The next step in the potato build process is to add a boot drive, which will be a solid state drive, or SSD, but before that, I should see if the machine will start up to the BIOS screen and all the fans are running, so that will be the subject of the next blog post.