The Radeon R7 260X is pretty much an overclocked HD 7790. It uses the same GPU with higher clock speeds on memory and GPU. A nice surprise is that the chip supports AMD TrueAudio, a unique feature it shares with R9 290 Series GPUs. HIS did not overclock their card, which is quite unfortunate because it has the card match the performance numbers of the AMD R7 260X reference design to a tee. Gaming performance numbers are around 8% higher than those of the HD 7790, 17% lower than the HD 7850, and 24% behind the GTX 650 Ti Boost. These numbers mean that the R7 260X should only be able to handle full HD 1080p gaming at reasonable detail settings and without anti-aliasing, at least in most cases. Some of the more demanding titles will also require you to run lower details.
The HIS cooler significantly improves noise and temperature levels over the really poor AMD reference design heatsink, but it is not as quiet as I would like. Quieting down the card would have been easy given its low temperatures, and it would have provided an additional selling point over other R7 260X custom designs out there.
You can find the HIS R7 260X online for $150, which is $10 more than the reference design. There are also many pre-overclocked cards available at $140, which makes justifying the extra cost of the HIS card a bit difficult because it comes with no overclock out of the box. Compare it to other cards on the market and the R7 260X is also not that good of a deal. AMD's own HD 7790, while a few percent slower and lacking 1 GB of VRAM, retails at only $110. The 17% faster HD 7850 costs $130, and NVIDIA's GTX 650 Ti Boost, the current price/performance king, is 25% faster and $20 cheaper. Given the competition in its segment, kicking sales off to a good start by reducing pricing to around $120 would be a wise choice.