The Radeon R9 280X Review: Feat. Asus & XFX - Meet The Radeon 200 Series
by Ryan Smith on October 8, 2013 12:01 AM ESTXFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation
The first of our R9 280X cards is our reference-like sample, XFX’s Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation. The R9 280X DD is XFX’s sole take on the 280X, utilizing a new and apparently significantly revised version of XFX’s Double Dissipation cooler, and paired with a 280X operating at the 280X’s reference clocks of 850MHz core, 1000MHz boost, and 6GHz RAM. Since there isn’t an overclock here, XFX will primarily be riding on their cooler, build quality, and other value add features.
Diving right into the design of the card, the R9 280X DD is a fairly traditional open air cooler design, as is common for cards in this power and price range. This basic design is very effective in moving large amounts of heat for relatively little noise, making the usual tradeoff of moving some of the cooling workload onto the system’s chassis (and its larger, slower fans) rather than doing the work entirely on its own.
In XFX’s case this is a new design, having forgone their older Double Dissipation design that we first saw on their 7970BEDD back in 2012. What’s changed? Without going into minute details, practically everything. At first glance you’re unlikely to even recognize this as an XFX card due to the fact that this is the first such product from XFX using this design, which aesthetically looks almost nothing like their old design.
First and foremost XFX has gone for the oversized cooler approach, something that’s become increasingly common as of late, equipping the card with one of the larger coolers we’ve ever seen. At 100mm in diameter the two fans on XFX’s design are among the biggest we’ve ever seen, pushing the card to just over 11.1 inches long while causing the heatsink and shroud to stand about 0.75” taller than the board itself.
Drilling down, XFX is using a two segment heatsink, the combined length of which runs the complete length of the card. Providing heat conduction between the GPU and the heatsink is a set of 6 copper heatpipes mounted into a copper base plate. 4 of these heatpipes run towords the rear of the card and the other 2 to the front, perpendicular to XFX’s vertical fin heatsink. Meanwhile cooling for the various discrete components on the board, including the memory, is provided by a separate cut-out baseplate that covers most of the card. There isn’t any kind of connection between the baseplate and the heatsink proper, so it’s the baseplate and any airflow over it that’s providing cooling for the MOSFETs it covers.
Moving on to XFX board, it looks like XFX isn’t doing anything particularly exotic here. XFX is using their standard Duratec high-end components, which includes using solid caps and chokes (typical for all cards in this power category) along with their IP-5X dust free fan. A quick component count has us counting 7 power phases, which would be the reference amount for a 280X, meaning we’re looking at 5 phases for the GPU, and another 2 phases for the memory and I/O.
Meanwhile for I/O XFX implements the common Radeon display I/O configuration of 2x DL-DVI, 1x HDMI, and 2x Mini DisplayPort 1.2. All the while external power delivery is provided by a set of 6pn + 8pin power connectors, as to be expected for a 250W card. With that in mind XFX’s design should have at least some overclocking headroom, but XFX doesn’t provide any overclocking software so you’ll need to stick with Catalyst Overdrive or 3rd party utilities such as MSI Afterburner.
Finally, as a Double Dissipation product the 280X DD is covered by XFX’s lifetime warranty policy, contingent on registering the card within 30 days of purchase. Interestingly XFX remains one of the few board partners that still offers any kind of lifetime warranty, making them fairly exceptional in that regard. As for pricing we’re listing the XFX card at $329 at the moment, though there is still some confusion over whether that’s the final price or not as our XFX rep seemed unsure of that. As is sometimes the case in this industry, we get the impression that they were waiting to see what other manufacturers were going to charge, in which case we suspect the actual launch price will be lower than that. We’ll update this article once we have final pricing information available.
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Sabresiberian - Wednesday, October 9, 2013 - link
I don't think any current game dev can complain about the top API suites today when they don't even take advantage of the hardware available.Kudos to those beginning to take advantage of multiple cores in CPUs, but what you are doing clearly isn't enough. It is ridiculous that a 6-core hyperthreaded CPU doesn't provide a significant performance boost in any of today's games over a 4-core CPU without hyperthreading, and we've had them for 5 years now, so the hardware has been around longer than the development cycle of most games and should be taken advantage of by now. This is not the fault of Direct3D or OpenGL.
I'm excited about the possibilities of Mantle, but skeptical of the results. We'll see.
AnnihilatorX - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
On the page about TrueAudioshould it read:
Tensilica’s audio DSPs are task-specific programmable hardware, somewhere between fixed [s]function[s] and fully programmable in function,
?
Hixbot - Friday, October 11, 2013 - link
Well another gen of graphics cards and no serious change in performance per dollar. The past 2 years of PC hardware development have been BORING. Why do the big players refuse to compete seriously?fantasysportsguy - Saturday, October 12, 2013 - link
So if you have an HD 7850, what is the upgrade path?SirKronan - Sunday, October 13, 2013 - link
"Of course the fact that AMD also needs to get rid of the 7000 series at the same time isn’t going to do them any favors. There’s no getting around the fact that similar 7000 series products are going to be equal to or cheaper than 200 series products, at least for the immediate launch. "This prediction turned out to be WRONG. It is what I was expecting as well, but the opposite happened. Every 7970 on just about every store I shop at seems to have JUMPED by about $80.
What the heck??
Compuservant - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
You do realize there is another Asus R9 280 GPU. The Asus R9 280X Matrix Platinum is their top model in this specific range and ships with a core overclock at 1,100mhz. The GDDR5 memory has also been overclocked to 1,600mhz (6.4Gbps effective).Aside from the massive overclock, Matrix R9 280X graphics cards have exclusive ROG VGA Hotwire technology built in for even more overclocking headroom. By wiring the Matrix R9 280X’s VGA Hotwire terminals to header connections on the motherboard, users are able to overvolt right away.
In conjunction with the TweakIt utility and the plus and minus buttons fitted to some ASUS ROG motherboards, VGA Hotwire puts overvolting adjustments at users’ fingertips – so they can gradually and safely increase power for higher speeds and smoother gaming. With Matrix R9 280X cards, TweakIt offers a wider voltage-modulation range than ever before and it’s also possible to immediately activate the dual 100mm fans — enabling maximum airflow and instant cooling at the touch of a button.
Most of above was cut and paste (sorry), but do you know of a supported motherboard for the i7 4770k CPU?
I think I read that the new cards can do crossfire without a bridge/connector. Imagine the performance for $650 or so, for 2 280x Matrix Platinums!
Death666Angel - Tuesday, October 15, 2013 - link
I know the article is older, but I just got to it.In the overclocking section, you write:
"The Asus card meanwhile was good for 40MHz more, for a 4% base/4% boost overclock, while its memory could do an additional 800MHz (13%)."
But it base clock is factory overclocked at 6.4GHz and it achieves a 6.8GHz clock in your test, so it is "just" a 400 MHz boost.
Dragonheart.BY - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
Is there any info about 280 non-x? Will it be released at all?inFormal - Wednesday, December 18, 2013 - link
I m trying to find (& order) an Asus R9 280x DCII 3GB (Tahiti XTL) but everywhere i looked they're "OUT OF STOCK" ... what the fudge ? Don t they know that i am prone to do useless it shopping during December ?dsmogor - Friday, January 24, 2014 - link
Can SteamOS access that as well (by having Mantle somewhat integrated with OGL) we would have a winninng arch/software combination.