The card

As noted earlier, the Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition graphics card features Sapphires quite famous Dual-X cooler with a total of four heatpipes. The two inner heatpipes feature 8 millimeter diameter and the outer ones are 6 millimeter heatpipes. The cooler also features a metal plate, which got equipped with thermal pads, to provide active cooling even for the memory chips. Looking at the VRM area we find a separate aluminum profile, which is being actively cooled by the air passing through dense heatsink above it. In order to move heat away from the large fin stack, there are two fans, each measuring 100 millimeter in diameter. The Dual-X cooler is definitely a very capable model and compared to AMDs reference cooler this is a great upgrade. As part of the Dual-X series, the Dual-X R9 280 uses a black on blue color scheme and the overall build quality of the cooler is very good.

Overclocking

The Sapphire Dual-X 280 OC Edition graphics card, or to be precise our sample of it, allowed a maximum stable overclock of 1'300 MHz for the GPU and 1'600 MHz on the memory side. We used Furemark V1.11.0 Geeks3D benchmark with 15 minutes duration. With these clocks we had to feed the GPU with 1.21 Volts and the memory ran at stock voltages. Sapphire is locking the BIOS to 1.20 volts maximum. We would like some more headroom with this card, since the powerdesign could cope with higher loads easily and the card could also be overclocked quite a bit higher.



For its Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition, Sapphire makes use of an entire custom design PCB. The PCB color is blue and features an improved power design. There is a total of 6+2+1 (GPU, Memory and PLL, PCIe) phases on this Dual-X R9 280 card. GPU, memory and VRM phaes all received active cooling.



The memory chips used are made by SKhynix and carry the model number H5GCQ2H24BFR. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).

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Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications	Page 11 - DIRT Showdown
Page 2 - The card	Page 12 - Far Cry 3
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery	Page 13 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 4 - Test Setup	Page 14 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 5 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 15 - Metro: Last Light
Page 6 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 16 - GTA V
Page 7 - BattleField 3	Page 17 - Power Consumption
Page 8 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 18 - Temperatures / Noise levels
Page 9 - Crysis 3	Page 19 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 10 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2	Page 20 - Conclusion