Conclusion

First of all lets talk about prices. Let's consider that the two R9 280X together cost 422 Euro. Compare that to the 389 Euro you'd have to pay for the cheapest reference NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 we can find. Therefore this one high-end card is is about 13 percent cheaper than the two mid-range models.  

To dive a bit deeper into the results, we start with performance differences in 3DMark graphics score where we see that the CrossFire of the two R9 280X is between 72 and 78 percent faster than the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780. In the next theoretical test we ran, Unigine Heaven, we see that the two R9 280X's are on average 13 slower than the NVIDIA GTX 780. In case of games it turns out that for example in Skyrim one the one NVIDIA card is about 6 percent quicker than the two cards in CrossFire. A closer look at Call of Duty Black Ops 2 shows the other end of the scale, where the two R9 280X's score 50 percent better than the single NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780. In this case we see a rather huge variance in the test results.

Overall the two R9 280X cards are performing really well and there is no doubt the two of them are seriously quick, actually, on average they're 24.8 pecent quicker than one GTX 780. But the problem is that the average value is not even telling half the story. It turns out that in one of the games tested the games we tested the single card was quicker, then there are games where the difference is small and last but not least there are some titles where the two 280X cards are a lot faster. This in the end makes performance rather unpredictable. Other than that ther is power consumption. In idle the power consumption of our test system is 78 percent higher with the two R9 280X then with one GTX 780 and under load conditions the setup with two AMD cards can almost be used as a heating system, burning more than twice as much power. If you were to buy a new graphics cards for your system and your coming from a substantially slower environment having roughly 400 Euro at your disposal, we would, without a shadow of a doubt, recommend one high-end single GPU card. However, if you already own one R9 280X and you don't care about power consumption, then adding a second R9 280X to you system can boost performance in quite a few games substantially.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 10 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 11 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 12 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 13 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 14 - GTA V
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 15 - Power Consumption
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 16 - Performance Index, price
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2	Page 17 - Conclusion
Page 9 - DIRT Showdown