Introduction

With a market presence of close to two years and counting, the Radeon HD 7000 series kept AMD afloat in the discrete PC graphics market. The company pretty much sat out 2012, probably focusing its efforts on getting its next-generation console chips right. Come Q4 2013 and a product-stack update is long overdue for AMD. The company feels that the silicon it built its HD 7000 on is still fit for duty, provided that SKUs based on them are repositioned in the product stack much in the same way NVIDIA shuffled its with the GeForce GTX 700 series. Much like NVIDIA, AMD is going into its new generation with just one new chip it codenamed "Hawaii" while repositioning "Tahiti" and "Pitcairn" based SKUs one tier lower.



The R9 290 series will succeed the HD 7900 series in the product stack, and the R9 280 series succeeds the HD 7800 series while the R9 270 series succeeds the HD 7700 series. Since such an arbitrary product stack repositioning would create unreal price-performance increments at the price points AMD launched its various HD 7000 series products, AMD tweaked pricing a little, so there really is a different and equally valid way of looking at AMD’s new product stack by using price points.

The Radeon R9 280X we have with us today is an interesting proposition for $299. It’s fundamentally identical to the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition from last year, but sells at a price that isn't too far off the $249.99 at which the Radeon HD 7870 debuted. Under the hood, the card is based on the same 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon that proved to be AMD's workhorse performance-segment chip for the better part of the two years.

The Radeon R9 280X comes at an interesting time: DICE, publishers of the smash-hit "Battlefield" online multiplayer shooter franchise, announced that the recommended system requirements for the upcoming "Battlefield 4" prescribes graphics cards with at least 3 GB of video memory. That disqualifies the likes of the $410 GeForce GTX 770 and even NVIDIA’s flagship for last year, the GeForce GTX 680. Even though a very artificial requirement, it could still impact buyers psychologically, swaying them to buy either the R9 280X or the now $220-ish HD 7950.

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, churning out 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth.



We have with us the MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Series. The card is based on a PCB that's practically identical to that of the HD 7970 TwinFrozr III graphics cards from the previous generation, but with the new TwinFrozr IV cooling solution that did wonders on some of the company’s GeForce GTX 700 series products. At 1050 MHz, the card comes with a 5% overclock on the GPU.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• PCIe power cable
• DVI adapter
• HDMI adapter
• CrossFire bridge

The Card

We've seen MSI's GAMING cooler design a few times before, on cards using NVIDIA GPUs. Two large fans cover most of the surface of the PCB to keep it cool. Dimensions of the card are 26.5 x 12.5 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include one DVI port, one HDMI port, and two DisplayPorts. You may use all outputs at the same time, so triple-monitor surround gaming is possible with one card.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


Two available CrossFire connectors allow you to combine up to four R9 280X cards in a CrossFire configuration.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.