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MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming 6 GB Review
Packaging & Contents »Introduction
AMD's Radeon R9 280X has been on the market since October last year, but it wasn't really a new product even back then. The card is basically a rebranded HD 7970 GHz Edition with a slightly lower GPU clock, which essentially makes the it a 2 1/2 year old product. Nevertheless, the card still satisfies when it comes to driving 1080p displays at maximum details in all the latest games.
Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, the Radeon R9 280X features 2,048 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture, 128 texture memory units (TMUs), 32 raster operations units (ROPs), and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 3 GB. AMD's reference clock speeds for the chip are 1000 MHz on the core and 1500 MHz (6.00 GT/s effective) on memory, which results in 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Today, we are reviewing the MSI R9 280X Gaming 6 GB, which doubles the memory from 3 GB to 6 GB, promising improved performance at higher resolutions. The card is also overclocked out of the box and comes with MSI's signature TwinFrozr cooling solution. Right now, the MSI R9 280X Gaming 6 GB is available for $400 online, a quite significant price premium over standard 3 GB variants.
| Radeon R9 270X | GeForce GTX 660 Ti | GeForce GTX 760 | Radeon HD 7950 | GeForce GTX 670 | Radeon HD 7970 | GeForce GTX 770 | HD 7970 GHz Ed. | Radeon R9 280X | MSI R9 280X Gaming | GeForce GTX 680 | GeForce GTX 780 | Radeon R9 290 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Units | 1280 | 1344 | 1152 | 1792 | 1344 | 2048 | 1536 | 2048 | 2048 | 2048 | 1536 | 2304 | 2560 |
| ROPs | 32 | 24 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 | 64 |
| Graphics Processor | Pitcairn | GK104 | GK104 | Tahiti | GK104 | Tahiti | GK104 | Tahiti | Tahiti | Tahiti | GK104 | GK110 | Hawaii |
| Transistors | 2800M | 3500M | 3500M | 4310M | 3500M | 4310M | 3500M | 4310M | 4310M | 4310M | 3500M | 7100M | 6200M |
| Memory Size | 2048 MB | 2048 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 3072 MB | 6144 MB | 2048 MB | 3072 MB | 4096 MB |
| Memory Bus Width | 256 bit | 192 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 384 bit | 256 bit | 384 bit | 512 bit |
| Core Clock | 1050 MHz | 915 MHz+ | 980 MHz+ | 800 MHz | 915 MHz+ | 925 MHz | 1046 MHz+ | 1050 MHz | 1000 MHz | 1050 MHz | 1006 MHz+ | 863 MHz+ | 947 MHz |
| Memory Clock | 1400 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1250 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1375 MHz | 1753 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1500 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1502 MHz | 1250 MHz |
| Price | $200 | $260 | $245 | $230 | $270 | $350 | $300 | $470 | $280 | $400 | $400 | $480 | $380 |
