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 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
151 Comments
View All Comments
maybeimwrong - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I am concerned that I have to "Return to Anandtech" from a major new product review. This site is not AMDtech. If you want to have a special AMD section that aggregates relevant content, I'm fine with that. I am not fine with reviews being visible only in a place that presents no means of accessing general content on the site. Presenting review articles in this way is a terrible decision, and readers will stop trusting your content if you keep it up. I say this as a big fan of the site: please change the way "AMD" articles are handled immediately.SolMiester - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Hmmm, just noticed that....buy out complete?toyotabedzrock - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
TrueAudio might die because they didn't add it to all their cards, very lazy and half baked.rtho782 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Can you Crossfire an R280 with a 7970? Would make for a cheap upgrade path as they are basically the same card...hodakaracer96 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
I currently own a 2-way sli 770 setup so I may be biased. It seems NVIDIA can still charge a premuim (maybe $50) over the R9 280x due to much better SLI/crossfire capiblity (I know the newest AMD beta drivers fix latency issues, but the fact NVIDIA does frame pacing in hardware makes me feel better about it) and better performance/watt. My room gets pretty toasty and my 750 watt power supply is already on the edge. even an extra 50 watts from 2 - R9280x's would be unwanted.Frenetic Pony - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
When it was AMD was firing key positions I knew it was bad, but now we know specifically HOW bad. Not a singe new GPU. I don't want Nvidia to have a monopoly damn it, maybe AMD should be looking at plans to sell to someone like Qualcomm if this holiday season doesn't hit it big for them.FuriousPop - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
Aren't these the reference cards? So won't there be more tweaks, different coolers, OC's etc when the rest of them get a hold of it and start making their changes?If these truelly are reference cards, i thought these looked pretty good considering...
I understand an Asus one is tested - to be fair i have 2xasus 7970's tops, they tend to be slighty slower then the rest of the pack by little numbers however with better temps/noise lvls...
Bring on the 7970 bring bro aka. Titan Killer!
bwat47 - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
Nvidia has done re-badges like this too, they both do it.b3nzint - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
I see the cooler on r9-290x got 3 air tunnel at the back. Is ref. r9-280x will use the same cooler?Futureman666 - Tuesday, October 8, 2013 - link
now let's see NVidia lower the price of the GTX 770 4 GB so I can buy two of them and upgrade my rig . The price of those card are not right at the moment they should have been way lower . hope that AMD R9 will put enough pressure on NVidia . The only sour on this review seems once again AMD drivers (which seems to suck time and time again ) maybe Ryan did not have enough time to try 2 R9 280x card in crossfire .. I would have been impressed to see a comparison between the NVidia offerings 2 x gtx 760 and 2 x Gtx 770 in sli versus ... Maybe the damn drivers where not ready again to support these 2 cards in crossfire .. i'm eager to see the results