GIGABYTE R9 280X WindForce 3X OC Review

On a budget but want a powerful graphics card? GV-R928XOC-3GD may suit your pocket with top drawer performance but half the price of flagship graphics cards…

Product on Review: GV-R928XOC-3GD
Manufacturer and Sponsor: GIGABYTE
Street Price: £275.99 GBP / $400 USD

The R9 series of GPUs have proven very popular, especially those which have a custom cooler with which to keep noise and temperature levels down to a minimum. The GIGABYTE R9 280X WindForce 3X OC is one such graphics card which as the name suggests, utilises the excellent Windforce cooling design. This cooler is widely regarded as one of the best available so while the Tahiti core of the R9 280X was never regarded as an extremely hit chip, the AMD sliver of silicon will certainly benefit from added cooling, especially when we look to overclock the card. We have also been heavy critics of the reference cooler due to the noise production but this could not be further from the truth with the Windforce design. Cool, quiet and high performing – what could go wrong?

While we have always held the HD7900 series in high regard here at VORTEZ, especially the HD7970, the Tahiti core on which it is based is beginning to get a little long in the tooth. It was first released almost two years ago to the day and two years is a very long time in the graphics card segment. While the price may have come down, the beating heart of the R9-280X is still near identical to the one we reviewed back in December 2011. AMD have breathed new live into the Tahiti core though and taking a leaf out of NVIDIA’s book by renaming ‘old’ tech.

Can the Tahiti core still hang with the big boys that cost twice as much? If so the GIGABYTE R9 280X WindForce 3X OC could well be the gamers card of choice. We suspect however, that the R9 280X while being a capable range filler that will also strike a balance between cost and performance which in today’s market is certainly no bad thing.

About GIGABYTE

GIGABYTE was founded in 1986, establishing our uncontested position in continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted motherboard leader in the globe. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we have offered a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Slate Devices, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Mobile Phones. We are dedicated to building up a full-range digital life, responding promptly and sonorously to consumer needs and desires.

Specification

A simple re-brand?

Above is a side by side comparison of the GPU-Z readouts from both the R9 280X (top most) and HD7970 (bottom). Aside from the clockspeeds and resulting texture results, the physical specifications are identical. Both cards use the Tahiti core, have the same amount of memory and bus width meaning for all intents and purposes, both cards attributes are identical. So are AMD simply re-branding the HD7970 and passing it off as a ‘new ‘ graphics card. Well yes and no.

The R9 280X features the same core, and with it the same features of the HD7970. This is no bad thing of course because the HD7970 was, and still is a fantastic high end graphics card capable of most situations you care to throw at it. With 3GB of GDDR5 it wants for pretty much nothing but add an increase in both clockspeed and memory speed as standard and what we now have is a flagship card that should still be capable of mixing it with NVIDIAs second tier of gaming cards. Yes, we would all prefer new technology but that will come with the R9 290X. What AMD have done with the R9 280X is nothing new, indeed NVIDIA use similar tactics when using up excess silicon. What is key is the price.

It is almost 2 years since we reviewed the HD7970 and upon release it was a circa £500 graphics card. We expect the R9 280X cards to enter the market at around £240, less than half the price of a once flagship product. This strategically places the card above the GTX760 price yet below the GTX770 (at the time of writing). Not a bad move at all considering the performance of the HD7970 that this card is expected to exceed. So what is so good about the Tahiti core?

The Tahiti core which is the successor to the Caymen core of the HD6900 family. The Caymen core was based on a 40nm manufacturing process so it is fair to say that perhaps the biggest improvement to the Tahiti core is the reduction to 28nm process. This has enabled AMD to cram 4.31 billion (4,312,711,873) transistors into the Tahiti core as opposed to the 2.64 billion on the HD6970 Caymen XT.

Comprising of what AMD calls ‘Graphics Core Next (GCN)’ architecture which is optimised for heterogeneous computing, the new Tahiti core has upto 32 CU’s (compute units) with dual geometry engines along with 8 back-ends comprising of 32 colour ROPs per clock and 128 Z/Stencil ROPs per clock. Each CU has a Vector unit and Scaler Co-Processor and can execute instructions from multiple kernels.

The VLIW4 SIMD has evolved to the GCN quad SIMD which equates to similar computational power yet grants better performance, threading and simplification. The GCN also has a new Cache hierarchy with 16KB instruction Cache and32KB Scaler Cache shared between 4 CU’s. The L2 Cache is accessible by each CU with it’s own separate process to ensure coherency. These changes increase the GFLOPs by 140%.

Tesselation on the Tahiti core is also enhanced by increased Vertex re-use off-core which theoretically at least, means the R9 280X has 4 times the throughput of the 69XX series. The are improved ansioscopic filtering algorithms too which come at no performance cost allegedly. These new algorithm improvement will allow the use of Forward Rendering with 1000’s of potential light sources and will also mean MSAA can be rendered easily.

Looking at the schematics above, we can identify the bulk of the GPU is taken up with the 32 CU’s. Above these are the geometry engines. To the left and right are the 8 Render back-ends, 4 each side. There’s 768KB of L2 cache along with 6x64bit dual channel memory controllers making a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface capable of delivering up to 264GB/sec. All of technology coupled together is transferred through a fully compatible PCI Express 3.0 x16 bus interface. Have no fear though because the cards are backwards compatible with PCIe 2.0.

GIGABYTE GV-R928XOC-3GD (rev. 1.0) Specification

Chipset Radeon R9 280X
Digital max resolution 4096 X 2160(via a single HDMI connector and not supported with two DVI connectors)
Analog max resolution 2048 x 1536
Process Technology 28 nm
PCB Form ATX
Core Clock Base / Boost clock：1000 / 1100 MHz
Memory Clock 6000 MHz
Memory Size 3072 MB
Memory Bus 384 bit
Card Bus PCI-E 3.0
Memory Type GDDR5
DirectX 11.2
OpenGL 4.3
Multi-view 3
I/O DVI-I / mini DisplayPort*2 / HDMI*1
Card size L=285mm W=126mm H=38mm
Power requirement 600W(with one 6-pin and one 8-pin external power connectors)

AMD Zerocore Power Efficiency

AMD ZEROCORE POWER

ENABLING THE WORLD’S MOST POWER EFFICIENT GPUS

When a discrete GPU is in a static screen state it works to minimize idle power by enabling a host of active power saving functions including (but not limited to); clock gating, power gating, memory compression, and a host of other features. However, GPUs with AMD’s exclusive AMD ZeroCore Power technology can take energy savings to entirely new heights by completely powering down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active. Nearly all PCs can be configured to turn off their displays after a long period of inactivity. This is known as the long idle state; where the screen is blanked but the rest of the system remains in an active and working power state (ACPI G0/S0).

As soon as the system goes into long idle state and applications are not actively changing the screen contents, the GPU enters the AMD ZeroCore power state. In the AMD ZeroCore power state, the GPU core (including the 3D engine / compute units, multimedia and audio engines, displays, memory interfaces, etc.) is completely powered down. However, one cannot simply remove the GPU and its associated device context completely; particularly when it is the
only GPU in the system as is the case in many enthusiast platforms. The operating system and SBIOS must still be aware that a GPU is still present in the system. For this reason, the AMD ZeroCore Power state maintains a very small bus control block to ensure that GPU context is still visible to the operating system and SBIOS. The AMD ZeroCore power state also manages the power sequencing of the GPU to ensure that the power up/down mechanism is self contained
and independent of the rest of the system.

The enablement of the AMD ZeroCore Power feature is controlled by the driver. The driver monitors the display contents and allows the GPU to enter the AMD ZeroCore Power in the condition that the GPU enters long idle and subsequent work requests are no longer being submitted to the engine. If any applications update the screen contents, AMD ZeroCore Power technology can periodically wake the GPU to update the framebuffer contents and put the GPU
back into the AMD ZeroCore Power state. Furthermore, applications such as Windows 7 desktop gadgets are architected to minimize activity and save power in the long idle state. These applications are active during screen on mode to display dynamic content such as weather, RSS feeds, stock symbols, system status, etc. but also have the intelligence to suspend any updates and activity when the system enters long idle. These applications will not wake the
GPU from the AMD ZeroCore Power state in long idle.

AMD ZeroCore Power technology delivers tremendous energy savings. Many PCs remain in the long idle state for a variety of use cases that are highly relevant to everyday consumers, enthusiasts and professionals. In AMD ZeroCore Power mode, users can still enjoy non‐graphics activities such as file serving/streaming, motherboard audio and music, and remote access while the GPU core is essentially powered off.

GCN (Graphics Core Next)

Available on select, high-performance AMD Radeon™ R9 and HD 7000 Series graphics products, the Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture is a radically new approach to the design of a consumer GPU.

Designed to push not only the boundaries of DirectX® 11.2 gaming, the GCN Architecture is also AMD’s first design specifically engineered for general computing. Equipped with up to 32 compute units (2048 stream processors), each containing a scalar coprocessor, AMD’s 28nm GPUs are more than capable of handling workloads-and programming languages-traditionally exclusive to the processor. Coupled with the dramatic rise of GPU-aware programming languages like C++ AMP and OpenCL™, the GCN Architecture is truly the right architecture for the right time.

Performance

In simple terms, increasing the number of transistors in a GPU has a big impact on the potential performance of a graphics card-but transistors alone are not enough. It takes a truly great design, like the GCN Architecture, to effectively utilize that potential for real-world performance.

Below you will find just a few examples of how this truly next-generation architecture delivers on one very simple design goal: enable the world’s most powerful graphics cards.1

Starting with GPU utilization, AMD has taken great strides to ensure that the GCN Architecture is capable of efficiently using its hardware resources. This seems like such a simple idea, but designing a GPU to frequently approach its peak theoretical performance is a challenge the GCN Architecture tackles with ease.

The GCN Architecture is designed for improved utilization, which ensures that the GPU is making optimal use of its resources for maximum performance.

The GCN Architecture also benefits from dramatically improved tessellation performance. Games featuring this DirectX® 11 technology are considerably faster than they were on the previous generation of AMD Radeon™ products. There is also the new Mantle API which promises to dominate NVIDIA, especially in titles such as Battlefield 4. Project Mantle is one of AMD’s most innovative and game-changing features, delivered with the Radeon™ R9 and R7 Series product line. Mantle is a new application programming interface (API), leveraging the commonality between the next-gen consoles and Radeon™. It enables game developers direct communication to our GPUs, unlocking the true potential of GCN and resulting in significantly higher gaming performance at all segments. We will be looking at Mantle in a separate article but if what we hear is correct, Microsoft (who are responsible for DirectX) should be very worried.

Every gamer knows that the GPU’s clockspeed also has a big impact on the performance of a graphics card, and the GCN Architecture keeps that in mind.

But what many don’t know is that every graphics card is designed to draw only a certain amount of power from your PC’s power supply. This is called the Thermal Design Profile, or TDP, and it’s critical that the GPU architecture is capable of making the most of every watt. The GCN Architecture can do that thanks to a technology called AMD PowerTune technology.

AMD PowerTune is an intelligent system that performs real-time analysis of the games and applications that utilize a GPU. Examples of such software might include Battlefield 3 or Furmark. In the event that an application is not making the most of the power available to the GPU, AMD PowerTune can improve that application’s performance by raising the GPU’s clockspeed by up to 30%! Best of all, this technology is completely automatic and is designed specifically to improve gaming performance.

Available on all 28nm AMD Radeon™ products, AMD PowerTune is designed to enable significantly higher clockspeeds in your favorite games-automatically!

Image Quality

But performance is not enough for today’s demanding gamers. Image quality, or the clarity and accuracy of textures and effects, is equally important. The GCN Architecture is equipped with three key technologies that dramatically raise the bar in this regard.

Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
Even in the latest titles, gamers may have noticed that games often re-use or repeat textures, particularly on the ground or in background scenery such as mountains or trees. This is because increasing the physical size or number of textures in a game can have a negative impact on the performance of a GPU. PRT is a radical new technology that hopes to break this cycle.

PRT can utilize absolutely enormous texture files, up to 32 terabytes large, with minimal performance impact. PRT accomplishes this by streaming small bits of these massive textures into the GPU as needed, giving compatible games a virtually endless supply of unique texture data it can apply to the game world. The GCN Architecture in 28nm AMD Radeon™ products is the first GPU design to feature a hardware implementation of this technology.

Partially Resident Textures (PRT) enables future games to utilize ultra-high resolution textures with the same performance as today’s small and often repetitive textures.

Improved Anisotropic Filtering (AF)

Available on every modern GPU, anisotropic filtering is a technique that assists the GPU in making sure textures in your favorite games remain razor sharp, even at a distance. Most games now offer the ability to enable this feature, and the AMD Catalyst™ driver suite has long provided players with the option to force enable anisotropic filtering for all of their games.

Where every GPU design differs, however, is in the way the anisotropic filtering is actually executed. The GCN Architecture has been specifically optimized to produce superior results when AF is enabled.

Improved anisotropic filtering in products like the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 Series ensure gamers get sharper, better textures when this technology is enabled.

Improved DirectX® 11 Tessellation
As DirectX® 11 titles become more mature, game developers are naturally pushing the envelope of realism by utilizing a greater degree of special rendering effects. One such effect is tessellation, which can dynamically generate additional detail in a scene on the fly.

A wireframe scene of a rally car in DiRT 3 driving through water. On the left, notice there are no ripples. On the right, after tessellation, there is new and dynamic detail in the game.

As with anisotropic filtering, tessellation is not new to GPUs, but the manner in which tessellation is executed can have a large impact on the gaming experience. Because of this, the GCN Architecture has again been optimized to deliver up to 4x the performance of the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series in heavily-tessellated games.

First Look

The huge 3x Windforce cooler smothers the PCB in its entirety. The Windforce cooler is not the ‘new, all metal design instead it has the sculpted plastic brace which is no bad thing as we actually prefer this design to the new one. The three smoked black fans all have translucent blades which force cool air down onto the monolithic heatsink below.

Despite recently making the shift to black PCBs, this version (ver 1) of the Windforce OC features the familiar blue PCB. So you have a choice, if you want a black PCB go for the version two. Have a blue themed PC, version 1 is what you want. That is of course of the PCB colour matters to you. You will also notice that the rear of the board features a small backplate to the VRM area. This serves to even the load of the separate heatsink which we will see when we remove the main cooler on the next page.

The dimensions of the GIGABYTE R9 280X could be a stumbling point for anyone who owns a smaller case as the card measures L=285mm W=126mm H=38mm. Being a twin slot design it will take up two PCI(e) slots.

To power the card you will need both a 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors coupled to a 600w PSU (minimum recommended).

Being and AMD card you will be happy to know this GPU is CrossfireX capable meaning you can add more cards from the same family to boost the performance significantly thanks to excellent crossfire scaling.

At the input/output end of the card we find the usual connectivity of DVI-I, mini DisplayPort x 2 and HDMI ports. This card is capable of supporting the new 4K resolution of 4096 X 2160 via a single HDMI port. We have yet to see how much grunt is required to drive a 4K monitor but watch this space as we have one lined up which we will be giving the usual Vortez treatment.

Let’s take a closer look at the card…

Closer Look

Removing the heatsink was a simple matter of removing the four spring loaded cross-head screws. Once removed, we found the cooler to be quite heavy thanks to the huge aluminium finned array. This heatsink was soldered to 3 oversized copper heatpipes that were sintered in the centre and soldered to a copper baseplate for near perfect core contact and thus heat transfer to the finned array.

The soldering on the base plate was a little messy in truth but we see no reason why the thin sliver of low buff copper should not have made good contact to the heatpipes.

The PCB layout is similar to the reference design with the VRM area located close to the power ports and memory chips surrounding the GPU core. You will notice that the VRM area features its own heatsink which can be removed via two screws and should provide ample cooling with the assistance of the main Windforce cooling design.

The version 1 of the Windforce OC utilises a 6 phase power for the core. However, this pales in comparison to the ASUS DCU II we reviewed recently which utilises a 10 phase power design. We have however shown that a larger phase power design does not always equate to higher overclocks. We will be watching the overclocking ability closely in this respect later in the review.

We were disappointed to find GIGABYTE had opted to use Elpida memory chips which thus far have proven to fall short of the blistering speed provided by Hynix chips. Again, we will see just how far these can be pushed but we fear it won’t be quite as far as it would have been with the Hynix. For info, the chips carry the product code of W2032BBBG with a rating of 6A-F meaning it is certified for 6GBPS.

Finally, we reach the core of the R9 280X, codenamed Tahiti. The Tahiti core, while old hat in terms of GPU technology is still one of the strongest slivers of silicon this side of a dual GPU and will handle any game, at any resolution with relative ease.

Test Setup & Testing Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphic card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and where possible the same drivers unless a newer driver rectifies an issue we have encountered or significantly improves performance to such an extent that continuing with an outdated driver is not feasible.

Frame Time Analysis
We have also seen the emergence of frame time analysis. We covered this in a separate article here: GPU Reviews: Why Frame Time Analysis is important so we won’t go into the reasoning again but to summarise, our testing comprises both FPS testing and perhaps arguably more importantly, frame time analysis. We also look at overall performance by equating averages across the games and finally before concluding our review we take a look at value for money.

HardwareWith the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X58 setup to the new X79 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to 4.5GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB of ram on board there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics cards on test:

GIGABYTE R9 280X WINDFORCE 3X OC 3GB GDDR5

(CAT 13.11)
AMD RADEON R9 290X 4GB GDDR5(CAT 13.11 Beta v5)
ASUS R9 280X DirectCU II 3GB GDDR5(CAT 13.11 Beta v1)
ASUS GTX760 DirectCU Mini OC 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
Inno3D iChill GTX 780 HerculeZ X3 Ultra 3GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
ASUS GTX770 DIRECT II CU OC 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
MSI GTX760 Twin Frozr Gaming 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
GIGABYTE GTX780 Windforce x3 OC 3GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
GAINWARD GTX780 PHANTOM ‘GLH’ 3GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
INNO3D GTX760 ICHILL HERCULEZ 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
GIGABYTE GTX770 WINDFORCE 3X OC 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.49)
ZOTAC GTX760 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.39)
NVIDIA GTX760 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.39)
]NVIDIA GTX760 2GB GDDR5 SLI(Forceware 320.39)
SAPPHIRE DUAL-X HD7950 3GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 13.6 beta)
CLUB 3D HD7970 royalAce 3GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 13.6 beta)
GAINWARD PHANTOM GTX 770 2GB GDDR5 (Forceware 320.18)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB GDDR5 (Forceware 320.18)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 3GB GDDR5 (Forceware 320.18)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690 4GB GDDR5 (Forceware 314.22)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN 6GB GDDR5 (Forceware 314.22)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN SLI 12GB(2x6GB) GDDR5 (Forceware 314.22)
NVIDIA GTX680 2GB GDDR5 (Forceware 314.22)
AMD HD7970 3GB GDDR5 (AMD CAT 13.3 beta)

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition @ 4.5GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 1866MHz 9-10-9-27
Power Supply – Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 1200W
Hard Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB
Cooler – Corsair H100

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we have chosen:

Battlefield 3
Crysis 3
Far Cry 3
BioShock Infinite
DiRT: Showdown
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included 3 of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we use the included iPower Meter found with our Thortech PSU. As system load figures obviously differ from idle it is extremely difficult to get an accurate figure of system draw and then simply take this figure away from the overall amount because each game will generate varying levels of CPU and hard drive activity. Dynamic power adjustments which fluctuate in game will also affect accurate power figures thus rendering any such power consumption calculations redundant at worst and approximate at best.

We will therefore take our system readings averaged over a benchmark run of Tessmark (100% load) and after 20 minutes of being idle in Windows 7. These can then be used as a comparison to other graphics cards to determine how much more or less power you can expect a GPU to consume.

Power consumption was as expected extremely close to its nearest competitor, the ASUS Direct II CU. It consumes around the same as a GTX770 but far less than a GTX780 and R9 290X.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.

The R9 280X series of cards do not have the huge ceiling seen with the 290X family so with the added benefit of Windforce cooling we expected good results and weren’t disappointed. The GIGABYTE card not beat the ASUS competitor for keeping temperatures under control but also turned out to be the coolest AMD based GPU on test. GIGABYTE Windforce: we applaud you!

Acoustics

Normally cooling a card as well as the Windforce card does you need either triple slot cooling or fast (noisy) fans. The Windforce design requires neither and yet is still one of the quietest designs on the market. If you want extremely good cooling in a package that could sneak up on a psychic cat with disturbing it then the Windforce is for you!

Overclocking

For overclocking the GIGABYTE Windforce 3x OC R9 280X we will be using AMDs Overdrive utility.

Above is a screenshot of GPU-Z showing the reference clockspeeds. It is worth pointing at this point that the card is pre-overclocked at the factory to an already blistering 1100MHz on the core so we doubt very much there will be any overclocking headroom being that most cards start to crash any further than this to credit to GIGABYTE for hitting such a fast factory overclock.

With a little coaxing we did manage to squeeze a further 50MHz on the core. Sadly this was not quite as far as some other cards have managed though. While it is by no means a poor overclock (due to the factory overclock already in place), we were hoping for more. Also, as we feared, the memory wasn’t the best at overclocking either however we did manage a 520MHz (effective clock out of this totalling a healthy 6520MHz which is quite good for the Elpida chips.

As with all of our overclocks, we like to ensure they are stable and to do this we leave Unigine Heaven 4.0 running for a number of hours, heating the card up to its full operating temperature then make a further benchmarked run to compare the stock vs overclocked results seen above.

Gaming Experience (Frame Time Analysis)

Here we take a look at both average (black) and 99th Percentile (coloured) response times of the graphics cards. It is highly unlikely a user will notice any micro stutter (also incorrectly referred to as lag but the effect can be interpreted to be similar) at anything below 30ms but every gamers perception differs.

Comment

The graphs above may appear very daunting however, what you want to see is a smooth line (not fuzzy) with very few peaks and troughs. While you are unlikely to notice peaks and troughs below 30ms, any peak above 30ms may be seen as a stutter during gameplay. This will however depend greatly on your own perceptions. Multi card setups are more likely to show frame lag due to the nature of cross communicating to render frames.

Average and 99th Percentile response times (Frame Time Analysis)

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike (Synthetic)

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

Unigine: Heaven 4 (Synthetic)

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

Unigine: Valley (Synthetic)

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

Battlefield 3 (FPS)

Battlefield 3 leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite™ 2, the next installment of DICE’s cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and incredibly lifelike character animations. As bullets whiz by, walls crumble, and explosions throw you to the ground, the battlefield feels more alive and interactive than ever before. In Battlefield 3, players step into the role of the elite U.S. Marines where they will experience heart-pounding missions across diverse locations including Paris, Tehran and New York.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the parking lot scene on Operation Sword Breaker. High and Ultra presets were loaded at both resolutions.

Crysis 3 (FPS)

Crysis 3 from Electronic Arts is the fourth instalment of the Crysis franchise and sequel to Crysis 2. It uses the CryEngine 3 gaming engine which is perhaps the most advanced gaming engine to date and therefore the most demanding. The meme ‘Can it run Crysis’ has never been so apparent…

Far Cry 3 (FPS)

Far Cry 3 is a tropical survival shooter video game from Ubisoft Montreal and Massive studios. It’s open world design has similar traits to it’s forbear Far Cry 2 but it does it all so much better. With stunning visuals and settings to bring a PC to it’s knee’s, this game is so much more than the ‘just another console port’ it was reported to be.

BioShock Infinite (FPS)

Set in 1912 during the growth of American exceptionalism, BioShock Infinite is a thrid person shooter developed by Irrational games and published by 2K Games. It is the third instalment of the BioShock franchise. the game utilises the Unreal Engine 3, modifying it with their own lighting engine to present a visually stunning experience like no other.

DiRT: Showdown (FPS)

DiRT Showdown is the new arcade racing game from the team that brought you the award-winning DiRT series, uncaged in 2012. Pick up and play controls combine with electrifying events, frenzied crowds and stunning graphics to deliver high octane, dive in and drive thrills from event one.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (FPS)

Skyrim is not a direct successor to the very popular Oblivion. Instead it takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion. The non-linear playing that made the Elder Scrolls such a popular series does however make a return along with the beautiful scenery the encompasses the world of Skyrim.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the drop down passage to Riverwood. V-sync was disabled to allow fluctuating (higher the 60) FPS for these runs. It is however recommended that v-sync is left enabled during normal gameplay due to the games dynamics.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Conclusion

The GIGABYTE R9 280X is a great card of that there can be no argument. It coped with almost everything we threw at it with relative ease. Heavily based on yesterdays technology you could be forgiven for dismissing this product however, while ageing, the AMD Tahiti core still has plenty of life left in it if our results are anything to go by.

As expected the Windforce design performed admirably. It kept temperatures under control, allowing for some fair overclocking results, despite already being heavily overclocked at the factory. All the while it was extremely quiet with the fan speed profile set to automatic but should you want to boost the cooling performance, even setting the fan speed to 100% added less noise than you would expect.

Our only real complaint is the blue PCB. It ruins the cards aesthetics in our opinion but on this we are happy to report that a revision 2.0 version rectifies this issue, replacing the blue PCB which a much more discreet and ‘theme’ compatible Matt black design. The revision 2.0 design also sees the VRMs beefed up which may enhance overclocking.

Overall, we were impressed with the GIGABYTE R9-280X. It represents good value for money, performs very well, its cool, quiet and if you ignore the blue PCB it looks great with the super Windforce cooler. Yes we would hope for better overclocking results deserving of such a fine cooling design and other than the title, it can be accused of bringing nothing new to the over populated world of graphics cards but as the old adage goes: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

To summarise:
Factory overclocked and super cooled, the GIGABYTE R9 280X Windforce 3x OC is a very good graphics card. Under the skin it may be getting on a bit however, it has still has the performance to keep ahead of all but the fastest cards.

Pros
+ Very fast mid/high-range card
+ Very quiet
+ Factory overclocked
+ Excellent temperature control

Cons
– Based on ‘old’ tech
– Blue PCB