General | + | - | |
With the Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition, MSI is
offering a R9 280X graphics card based on a Radeon HD 7970 reference PCB
design paired up
with their own new cooling solution. Overall, the Twin Frozr Gaming R9
280X OC Edition did good
in our testing, performance was in line with what we expected it to be, cooling performance
is
very good mostly thanks to the Twin Frozr IV cooler which makes the card very silent
as well as offers very good design. As always we would have liked to see the manufacturer overclock the memory and it would have been nice to get a higher factory overclocking on the GPU as well. |
- Performance
- Cooling performance - Design - Noise levels - Bundle |
- Memory Clock | |
Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
MSI's Twin Frozr IV cooler did a very good job on the Radeon R9 280X. The cooling performance was on a good level and so were the noise levels too. In idle conditions the card is inaudible and under load, the noise level can be described as very silent. | - Cooling performance
- Noise levels |
||
Performance | + | - | |
Overall the 3D performance is good, but as said
previously, we would like MSI to push the factory clock a bit further
in order to improve performance of its card and make it stand out from the
masses. Because of the slight overclock of 50 MHz, we are looking at roughtly 2% performance gain. Idle power consumption of the MSI card is rather high, since we measured 65 Watts on the wall, which is a whopping 19 Watts more than what we have seen with other Radeon R9 280X cards lately. Also, the load power consumption is high with 358 Watt. This is between 23 and 37 Watt more than other models. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
If we look at prices on Geizhals.at we find that the MSI Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition goes for 263 Euro. These days, the cheapest R9 280X graphics cards are available for roughly 253 Euro, which means that the Twin Frozr IV cooler as well as the factory overclocking make MSI charge you an additional 10 Euro, which, in our opionion, a fair offer, especially since the Twin Frozr IV is a really capable cooler. Apart from that, we would have loved to see a bit lower power consumption, but still, if you are looking for a solid gaming graphics card, then you will do nothing wrong with the MSI Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition. |
- Gaming - Modding |
||
We gave the Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition from MSI 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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ASUS Radeon R9 290X DirectCU II OC Review | PowerColor LCS R9 290X Watercooled Review |
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