Asus R9280X-DC2T-3GD5 Review

AMD’s new R9 and R7 series of graphics cards are already creating quite a buzz in the Indian market, even though they are yet to hit retail shelves. Expected to arrive in the first week of November, this new wave of GPUs from AMD goes all out against Nvidia’s Kepler line up and is priced very aggressively compared to their previous generation cards. Today, we’ll be looking at the R9 280X from Asus. This is their Direct CUII TOP edition of the card which comes with a decent factory overclock for the core and memory. Let’s see how this stacks up against Nvidia’s GTX 760, which also falls in the same price bracket. Design and Build The Asus R9280X-DC2T-3GD5 is a good looking card and is well designed. It’s long, measuring around 11.2-inches in length so you’ll need a spacious mid-tower chassis to accommodate it comfortably. The card features the famed Direct CU II cooling system with Asus’s proprietary CoolTech fan. If you look at the fans a bit carefully, you’ll notice that they are different and that’s because they both serve a different purpose. The special CoolTech fan has a hybrid blade system for much better outward force. This should help keep the heatpipes relatively cool even during the most intense gaming sessions.

Handsome looking card

Removing the heatsink reveals the 12-phase power along with Asus’s proprietary DIGI+ VRM circuit design. This allows for stable performance even after overclocking and better longevity in general. Coming to the rear of the card, we have two DVI ports (DVI-I and DVI-D), HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2. There are some ventilation ports above for venting the hot air directly out of the chassis. The R9 280X requires a 6-pin and an 8-pin power connector to work. The TDP of the R9 280X is 250W so a good quality 500W PSU should suffice nicely.

Good set of connectors

Features Despite the new naming convention, the R9 280X is essentially a rebranded HD 7970 GHz Edition. The new card still gets DX11.2, Mantle and OpenGL 4.3 support but some of the newer features like AMD’s TrueAudio is not supported. You can however CrossFire up to four of these cards together using the traditional bridge. The advantage if this is that you can now add this to your existing HD 7970 setup and end up paying significantly less as you would have for another HD 7970.

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The Asus R290X-DC2T-3GD5 is factory overclocked with a core clock of 1070MHz and a memory clock of 6400MHz. The card is based on the same Tahiti die so the shader units, memory bus, etc. remains exactly the same. Test Setup

• Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
• Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
• RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
• OS Drive: Plextor SSD, 256GB
• PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
• OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
• Catalyst Driver version: 13.11 Beta
• Nvidia driver version: 331.58

Performance The R9 280X displays remarkable performance but what’s even more surprising is the huge boost the older HD 7970 has received with the newer drivers. The 280X is faster than the GTX 760 by about 15-20 percent on average, which is impressive considering it’s based on the older Tahiti architecture. Ever better is the fact that the R9 280X even gives the GTX 770 a run for its money as it’s faster than it in some benchmarks. In terms of temperatures, the Asus R9 280X idles at 37 degrees Celcius and when stressed, never breached 71 degrees Celcius, which is pretty impressive. 3DMark 11 3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3 Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics’ Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the “Ultra High” preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View – 90, Level – “Fear no Evil”.

Crysis 2 Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and is based on the new CryEngine 3. Just like the first iteration of the game, Crysis 2 continues to be one of the best-looking shooters to date. The settings used for this benchmark were “Ultra and High” preset in Adrenalin, DX11 and High-resolution texture patch.

Dirt 3  Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game is extremely scalable and features DX11 tessellation effects. We used the built-in benchmark tool, along with “Ultra” quality preset.

Metro: Last Light Metro: Last Light is a first-person shooter video game that continues Metro’s legacy of being one of the most demanding games for the best of GPUs. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the built-in benchmark for this test.    

Verdict and Price in India After adding up all the taxes, the Asus R9280X-DC2T-3GD5 should set you back by Rs 23,210 once it hits retail around mid-November. This is a very aggressive price from Asus considering the very good custom cooler and factory overclock. Nvidia’s GTX 760 retails for the same price and between the two, the R9 280X is the obvious choice. In fact, it’s even faster than the GTX 770 (in some cases), which is priced a good Rs 10,000 more than AMD’s offering. Nvidia needs to seriously work on their drivers or hurry up with their next-gen cards as from the looks of it, it’s going to be a red Christmas.