Asus R9280X-DC2T-3GD5 Review

TechTrainIndia Rating:-  8.0/10

AVERAGE USER RATING:- 7.0/10

PRICE IN INDIA

23,210

Spacification:-

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.

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.