MSI R7 370 GAMING 4G Graphics Card

Went into this not expecting much more than an average card. Was more than impressed by the performance. The card itself sits well and is not overly big by all means. It can easily max out most modern titles at 60fps without breaking a sweat but will have to be toned down just a bit for more graphically intensive games. One of the better mid-range cards i’ve used and was actually my first venture into an AMD card. After noticing the strengths I went ahead and purchased another one for another build I was working on. One negative side note would be the RAPTR game recording software it comes with. It is horrible and caused many unknown crashes on many of my games. Once I turned off the overlay and capture feature everything ran smoothly.

So far so good. I upgraded to this R7 370 4g card to replace an aging Radeon 3870 HD in my Dell XPS 420. It is a pretty significant upgrade from what I had before. I did not really need to replace my 435w power supply with this card since the power draw was within 5w of my old card, but I went ahead and swapped out the old Dell 435w psu to a new Sentey 750w psu just to be safe. This card is extremely quiet and runs cool. Benchmarks are right where they should be based on what I’ve seen in online reviews. Mine is actually fast even though my motherboard only supports PCIe 2.0. So far my only gripe is that I can’t watch any videos above 1080p without slow down and skipped frame rates in YouTube. I don’t believe this is the fault of the card though so much as it is my aging motherboard that can’t keep up. 1080p plays fine for both games and videos so I think it’s just my old computer. If you have a faster newer computer, you results will no doubt be better than mine. My processor is a Core 2 quad 6700 with 8gig DDR2 800mhz ram. I bought this card mostly to beef up my old computer to get it ready for Windows 10 which I installed already. This card uses the AMD catalyst software so you can go directly to AMD’s site and get the latest and greatest drivers. Windows 10 reached out and did the upgrade to the Windows 10 version of Catalyst automatically during the upgrade process so I didn’t have to mess with it. So far the card works perfectly with no noted issues in Windows 10 so for those of you wondering if this card will work correctly out of the box in Windows 10, I can say YES you will have no worries.

When I built my new computer I really wanted to get the 280x but I didn’t have the cash to throw at it. I settled for this just to get it running and I was pleasantly surprised with its performance. It’s based on an older chip of course like the R9 270/280 cards, but it does its best to keep up with modern games. I’m running mine overclocked to a stable 1250mhz core clock and stock memory clock (couldn’t get it stable, stopped caring) and my Skyrim with all DLCs runs on Ultra settings (1600×900) with a few tweaks including a shadow resolution fix and community created high definition texture plugins, and it usually runs 60fps (vsync) with a minimum ~32-34fps in cities and certain other areas. If you have Skyrim you should understand that it’s going to pretty much do what it wants in some areas regardless of your graphics card.

I also bought the MSI 270x Gaming (not from Amazon) and I could barely tell the difference in framerates in Skyrim but the lighting looked a little better and it was using about 60% GPU instead of ~90-100% like this one. Rest in peace, I had to RMA the 270x after a couple days due to the good old flaming graphic card defect (which isn’t a brand or model specific problem, just to be clear) so this one is back until I figure out what I’m going to do about that.

I don’t have any extremely new or demanding games right now to give figures on (I imagine it might be less than stellar with a game like Battlefield 4 or Crysis 3) so I won’t dare say this card is all you’ll ever need, but with the games I have been playing (FO:NV, Skyrim, Flatout Ultimate Carnage, Fable III, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Rise of the Triad 2013) it runs like a champ and is a great budget buy.

Note: I am running AMD’s stable drivers instead of MSI’s drivers because they seem to be slightly more stable with overclocking.

Edit: I wanted to add that I think there are some driver issues with the latest Radeon series (260x OC / 270x Gaming since those are the ones I owned) because I was occasionally getting CTDs with the card falling back into safe mode or even bluescreens. At first I attributed it to an oversight in my BIOS settings for my RAM chips and I do admit that SOME of it was caused by me trying to push the core clock on this one a little too far, but after checking all that and making sure I was running proper dual channel RAM and verifying that the chips were indeed functioning properly, I think it was the graphics cards because ever since I bought a GTX-760 OC, I haven’t had those problems at all. I’m sure it will be fixed in future updates. New cards always have some bugs to be worked out, like the infamous webpage scrolling glitches and such (which I didn’t experience personally).