The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTThe Drivers, The Test & Our New Testbed
With the product introductions and specifications out of the way, let’s dive into the test.
The launch drivers for the 200 series sampled to the press are Catalyst 13.11 Beta 1, with a version number of 13.200.16, making them a newer build on the same branch as the current 13.10 Beta 2 drivers. As such there are no known functional differences between the current drivers for the 7000 series and the launch drivers for the 200 series. With that said we did encounter one specific bug in these drivers, which resulted in flickering lighting in Crysis 3 on high quality settings.
Note that this also means that these drivers also only contain Phase 1 of AMD’s Crossfire frame pacing fixes. This means frame pacing for Crossfire for single monitor displays is fully implemented, however frame pacing for multi monitor displays and 4K displays is not. Based on AMD’s most recent comments a fix is not expected until November, and while we don’t seriously see owners settling down to run Eyefinity or 4K displays off of 280X in CF – at least not until 290X arrives for evaluation – it’s unfortunate AMD wasn’t able to get this problem fixed in time for the 200 series launch.
| Catalyst 13.11B1 Frame Pacing | |||||
| Single Display | Eyefinity / 4K Tiled | ||||
| D3D11 | Y | N | |||
| D3D10 | Y | N | |||
| D3D9 | N | N | |||
| OpenGL | N | N | |||
Moving on, this article will mark the debut of our new testbed and benchmark suite. Both were due for a refresh so we’re doing so in conjunction with the launch of the 200 series.
For our testbed we have done a complete overhaul, the first one in 4 years. The trusty Thermaltake Spedo case that has been the skeleton of our testbed has been replaced with an NZXT Phantom 630. Similarly we’ve gone and replaced all of the internal components too; an IVB-E based 4960X operating at 4.2GHz for 40 lanes of validated PCIe 3.0 functionality, an ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional motherboard to operate our cards on, and 32GB of G.Skill’s lowest latency (CAS 9) DDR3-1866 RAM. Meanwhile storage is being backed by a Samsung 840 EVO 750GB, and power via a Corsair AX1200i PSU. Finally cooling is handled by a Corsair H110 closed loop cooler, and meanwhile the Phantom 630 leaves an open fan mount for us to tinker with closed loop GPU coolers (such as the Asus ARES II) in the future.
As for the new benchmark suite, we’ve gone through and appropriately updated our games list. New to the GPU 14 test suite are Company of Heroes 2, Total War: Rome 2, GRID 2, and Metro: Last Light (ed: Metro 2). With the holiday games season upon us, we expect to add at least one more game, along with swapping out Battlefield 3 for Battlefield 4 shortly after that is released.
Finally, though we won’t make use of its 4K capabilities in this review given the limited performance of R9 280X, Asus sent over one of their new PQ321 monitors for our testing needs. While still very much bleeding edge, we’ll be taking a look at 4K performance in the near future as appropriate cards arrive.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 + Samsung 305T |
| Video Cards: |
XFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation Asus Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition AMD Radeon HD 7970 AMD Radeon HD 7950 Boost NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA 331.40 Beta AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 1 |
| OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
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alfredska - Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - link
Yes, I made a couple mistakes in trimming the fat from Ryan's writing. I should have done another proof-read myself. This wasn't the point of my post, though.Ryan's review is littered with sentence pauses that drastically slow down your ability to read the article. Some examples are: starting too many sentences with words like "ultimately" or "meanwhile"; making needless references to earlier statements; using past or present perfect tense when just past or present tense is appropriate. I wrote the above example hoping that Ryan would put it next to his own writing and see whether he can 1) read it faster, and 2) retain more information from this version.
I can accept a misspelling here and there and even some accidental word injections of which I was guilty. The fluidity needs work though. If the reader cannot glide easily between paragraphs, they will stop reading and just look at pictures.
chuck.norris.and.son - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
tl:dr :( blablablaCan't you nail it down: AMD or Nvidia? Which GFX card should i buy to play Blockbuster like BF 4?
ShieTar - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
How about not buying any new GFX card and investing the savings into books in order to improve your reading skills?Will Robinson - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Radeon 280X will be the sweet spot card to get for BF4.R9 290X will be the open class champ over GTX780 I suspect.
piroroadkill - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
The best AMD card you can buy with your money, simply because Battlefield 4 will eventually feature the Mantle renderer which is for GCN cards only, and will probably be a killer feature.hrga - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Most moronic branding ever (at least the one to be overrun). They cutout vanilla 7850 or top end 7950 from the HD7000 lineup and call it with confusing R9/R7, unrealistically stupid marketing where nothing material stand behind those names.Another rebranding?
- Yes. [thinking. What the heck did you expect guys]
Not most successful?
- [thinking. depends on POV] Well, it's here to milk the most cash as our CPU business didnt produced anything valuable for three years. And we also must have something interesting to present in our slideshow presentation for investors. If we couldn't afford to produce whole new lineup we could always produce yet another rebranded line just like nvidia. We always learn from our (cartel) competition, and customers don't seem to have any objections on that matter.
So that's why you retain those moronically high prices?
- We just adjust that according to our competition (cartel)
But you never lower prices for HD7870 which today celebrates its second birthday and is produced on highly matured 28nm for at least six month. Instead you just rebranded it for second time after HD8860, so now we have R9 270X too. Don't you think you're customers would like to see some new designs while putting old products on discount prices?
Or at least you could introduce that R9 270, which is same old HD7870, with lower prices than todays HD7870 retail prices are?!
Instead of higher up prices for same performance (source Newgg http://imageshack.dk/imagesfree/xLh43741.jpg).
And why the heck R9 desination for this mediocre mainstream product?! You could weaselishly sell this c-rap at the end of 2011, but "Hello AMD!" It the end of 2013.
Pitcairn used in HD7800/HD8800 seriesis is smaller chip than Evergreen in HD5800, which only three years ago was produced on troublesome early 40nm process while this is two year old design now produced on highly mature TSMC 28nm-HK node for at least six month with far better yields? HD5850 had same or even lower prices at EOL (only year after introduction) than todays two year old Pitcairn desing. How do you explain that?
- Well ...Milking you know ... When you have good cartel environment like we have competing with nvidia we could sky rocket prices. And you know even crappy Intels Knights Corner chips today produced at 22nm would be any cheaper because Intel knows how to milk moneys on their tick-tock performance introductions and they certainly would gave up that experience in case of "Chip Previously Known as Larabee" (CPKL)
labodhibo - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Must read this.. totally different perspective:http://www.techspot.com/review/722-radeon-r9-270x-...
AssBall - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Well done review. I kinda like what Asus did with its 280x version.Typo: "Asus calls it “CoolTech” and it’s essentially an effort to build a fan that’s blow a an axial fan and a blower (radial) fan at the same time,"
[blow -> both?]
zlandar - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
This is why I wanted the Asus 770 card also in the recent 770 GTX roundup. The cooler design seems superior for single GPU purposes as long as you have the room for it in your case.AxialLP7 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Not trying to be AFC, just want to make sense of this: "Asus calls it “CoolTech” and it’s essentially an effort to build a fan that’s blow a an axial fan and a blower (radial) fan at the same time, explaining the radial-like center and axial-like outer edge of the fan." Can someone help? This is in the "ASUS RADEON R9 280X DIRECTCU II TOP" section...