AMD Radeon R9 280X (ASUS DirectCU II TOP) benchmarked and reviewed

AMD has come a long way with its Radeon HD series of graphics cards. Both the major GPU manufacturers have successfully shelled out a new generation of GPUs every subsequent year. It wasn’t long back (June 2008) that AMD introduced the revolutionary Radeon HD 4870 and 4850. This generation of GPUs marked AMD as a serious contender and alternative to Nvidia’s trusted GeForce lineup. The Radeon HD 4000 series served AMD well, and turned their fortunes around.

There has been no looking back since, AMD launched its first DirectX 11 lineup of graphics cards, with the Radeon HD 7970 and the rest of the HD 7000 series. Each successive generation was better than the one before, as they included major architectural enhancements than the previous generation.

However, this is not the case with AMD’s rebranded R9 and R7 series of GPUs. Sure, they let go of the “HD” nomenclature since it doesn’t signify the edgyness it did before, but all the cards of the R9 and R7 series are roughly reconfigured numbers from the previous generations, except the R9 290X. This was the case with Nvidia’s GTX 700 lineup too, all of them being just numeric updates fn the GTX 600 series. Summing up, there is no new silicon here. It’s the same old same old, with just a few cranks turned sideways.

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Meet the Radeon R9 280X

There is nothing really much to say from a technological standpoint about the Radeon R9 280x. It is almost identical to the Radeon HD 7970 Ghz Edition, the boost clock is actually 50MHz slower – but what accompanies this is a massive price drop. And as redundant as the technology in the 280X can be, the price drop is all what AMD are banking on, and what we really dig. We received the ASUS R9280X-DC2T-3GD5, which is priced at Rs. 22,000 (before taxes). The HD 7970, which is at the same level of performance, costs about Rs. 40,000. So you can see that the price difference is humungous.

From the numbers given above, it seems the Radeon R9 280X is almost at par the the GeForce GTX 770, but the GeForce costs about Rs. 6,000 higher than the Radeon. Ofcourse, with the Radeon, you don’t get the premium fan and aluminum body you get with the reference GTX 770.

The R9 280X version we received was the ASUS DirectCU II TOP R9 280X, which comes with a pair of fancy coolers. This baby is clocked up a little higher from the stock, with a 1070Mhz GPU frequency and 6.4 GT/s memory. This is the card that retails at Rs. 22,000 excluding taxes.

The DirectCU II cooler has proven itself worthy in so many cases and we really like it, only, for this case specifically, the length of the cooler clearly exceeds that of the PCB by a few millimeters. It gives us the idea that this cooler wasn’t designed for this chipset. Other noteworthy things, the card is powered by 8+6pin PCIe connectors, and has two CrossFire fingers. Outputs are handled by DisplayPort (hello 4K), HDMI and DVI connectors.

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