Sapphire Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 29.09.14Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| With the Sapphire Dual-X R9 280,
Sapphire is offering a R9 280 based on a custom PCB paired up
with their Dual-X cooler. Overall, the Sapphire Dual-X R9
280 did a very good job
in our testing, performance is the way we expected it to be, cooling performance
is great, since thanks to the Dual-X cooler the card is silent and we like
the design. In the case of the Sapphire R9 280 Dual-X OC Edition the GPU is overclocked by a mere 7MHz compared to the reference design from AMD, and since there is still plenty of headroom we would have liked to see a higher overclock. |
- Performance
- Cooling performance - Memory overclocking |
||
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| The Dual-X is definitely a good cooler and Sapphire is using a metal plate to establish contact with the memory chips and there is an additional aluminum profile taking care of providing the VRM with adequate cooling. The GPU is in direct contact with a copper plate through which four heatpipes have been routed. Furthermore the large fin-stack is being ventilated by two 100 millimeter fans. This approach makes for very good temperatures in idle as well as under load conditions. There is only one thing we would like to see improved/changed: the fan profile. Unfortunately this card is not as silent as it could be. We would love to see Sapphire providing another fan profile, which makes the card inaudible under idle conditions. Since there is plenty of headroom available in terms of cooling capacity, this should definitely be possible. | - Cooling performance | ||
| Performance | + | - | |
| Overall the 3D performance is good but Sapphire
could easily push the GPU frequency higher and not just bump it by a
mere 7MHz. It would have even be possible to add another 100 MHz to the
factory overclock. In this case it's down to the user, wheter you want
to push the chip higher or not. Overall this card is capable of competing with a GTX 760 for
example. Idle power consumption of the Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition card is high, since we measured 72 Watts on the wall. Load power consumption is 270 Watts. Load efficiency is about in line with the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition as well as with the Radeon R9 280X. |
- Performance | - Power consumption | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| If we look-up prices on Geizhals.at we find that the Sapphire Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition goes for 161 Euro, which makes it the cheapest R9 280 card listed on Geizhals.at. Checking Newegg we find this card for 209.90 US-Dollar. Should you be looking for a capable graphics card with good cooler, then the Dual-X R9 280 OC Edition from Sapphire should definitely be considered. |
- Enthusiast - Gaming |
||
| We give the Sapphire Dual-X Radeon R9 280 OC Edition very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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