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the Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or

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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more welcome

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to another unboxing today we've got the Radeon

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r7260x and what this card is if you don't feel like watching the rest of the

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video is basically a Radeon 7790

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but with some more features and with more performance so this is part of

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AMD's new generation of products which they're calling the r7 and r9 series r7

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refers to performance class gpus and r9

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refers to enthusiast class gpus so what is the key difference well one is price

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this sits in that sweet spot between 100 and 200 dollars where you can typically

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get some of the best bang for the buck the other difference is in well

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obviously performance so this card right here is not designed for you know three

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by 1080p ifinity setups or anything like that this is for gaming in modern titles

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at 1080p it has 896 stream processors it

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has two gigs of RAM and it is clocked at 1.1

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gigahertz on the core out of the box

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which is very very cool because it's the fastest stock GPU speed we've ever seen

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out of AMD it's got a typical board power of 115 watts so it's relatively

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low power consumption and that is reflected by the single pci express six

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pin connector on it you can also we'll do a quick tour of the card here where

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you can see that the the stock reference card is going to have a flower style

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heat sink so you can see there's going to be air flow coming from that single

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80 millimeter fan that is going to be

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just pushed down all over the card all over the memory in the vrm the vrm is

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the only part of the board other than the GPU itself that has a heat sink

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directly on it so you can see it's located up here near the front of the

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board it uses pci express 3.0 for

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connectivity although on cards of this caliber it doesn't really make much of a

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difference and on the back we've got the typical AMD layout two dual link dvi

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HDMI and DisplayPort but there's a big difference here AMD has changed the r7

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and r9 series to allow three displays at 1080p 60 hertz running off of dvi dvi

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and HDMI so you no longer need a displayport adapter very cool stuff next

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up we've got the crossfire connector which is present on the 260x and the

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back of the card where we don't see a whole lot there so let's talk about some

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of the technologies that are included before we hand things over to slick to

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tell us about the performance compared to the competition so number one is zero

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core zero core refers to AMD's ability to basically turn the GPU entirely off

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when you're not doing anything allowing you to save power when you're idling or

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not doing much on your computer which let's face it a lot of computers do the

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next feature that at the time of filming this video is completely unique to this

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card is true audio which is a programmable dsp right on the graphics

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card for you guys guessed it audio this allows

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the sound engineers that work on your favorite games to offload that

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processing that would normally be done on the CPU and have it done instead on

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the GPU itself this means that you're going to be able to get much more

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realistic audio effects so in particular convolution reverb is a technique that

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uses what you'd kind of consider to be an image of a room and how sound should

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behave in it so the materials it's made of the shape so that when you walk into

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a dungeon it'll echo and the drips of water will bounce around off the walls

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versus when you walk out it's a much more open feeling experience this has

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been implemented in thief i saw a demo of it and it actually works it's the

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first time we've seen any kind of real advancements in hardware sound for games

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since eax so that's very very exciting

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but right now just this card although guys stay tuned very soon there will be

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at least another card or two with this feature implemented next up is mantle

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this is really to me the big news about the r7 and r9 series of cards because

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they're directx 11.2 cards which is an API so they're also compatible with

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opengl and oh wait but mantle is now a third

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API that AMD wants developers using they want to leverage the experience that

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developers have developing games on the latest generation of consoles the ps4

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and the xbox one to use that same type

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of approach to program for desktop pc

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gpus so what mantle does is it bypasses

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directx and opengl completely forgets

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about those and is actually a completely new way that the game engine can

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interact almost directly with the card at a much lower level this should turn

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into some very tangible performance improvements and i'm extremely excited

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to see where this technology goes but there are some caveats because obviously

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if we have game developers they you know they have to support directx a lot of

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them support opengl and then now mantle and then what if NVIDIA had their own

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and then what if Intel had their own for onboard graphics and all of a sudden

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we've put a lot of extra load on the game devs well let's hope it doesn't go

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down that path but for now AMD's telling

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us that game devs have been asking them for this and in particular because of

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their presence in every next-gen console

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well it might actually succeed so that's extremely exciting there's a new fan

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profile as well as an updated power tune so the fan profile allows much more

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gradual ramp down and ramp up speeds of the fan so you don't hear that

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when the temperatures are sitting on a threshold where it changes quite

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frequently and power tune now accounts not only for GPU clock speed overall

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board power and power consumption but also temperatures so this is much like

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GPU boost 2.0 where you have a lot more granular control of how the card behaves

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with that said overclocking has been simplified somewhat to the point where

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all you really do now is adjust your maximum clock up and then the card will

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run sort of wherever it can you can make some adjustments to the power limits of

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the boards however the temperature limits come in pretty much set to their

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maximums so the only way to really um you know leverage more overclocking

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other than just turning that slider up is going to be to add better cooling to

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your graphics card the raptor app is something that AMD is talking about a

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fair bit which is a way of connecting with other gamers it's platform agnostic

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it allows you to get rewards for playing and most importantly this is another

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competitor for an NVIDIA technology they've had for a little while the

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GeForce experience it allows you to with one button just say look optimize my

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settings for this game i care more about the appearance of it or i care more

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about the performance of it and it'll just figure out what you want and it

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uses cloud-based data sourcing so it collects anonymous data from everyone

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else running the game as well as the performance they're getting and then

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optimizes your configuration based on other people who have similar hardware

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who are running it acceptably finally guys never settle as always

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games come with your card however stay tuned because never settle is changing

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constantly so you're going to want to check out what your card comes with at

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the time without further ado i'm going to hand this off to slit to tell you

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guys about the performance of the r7 260x

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the charts you're going to see here in a moment are going to be quite general they're going to have all the graphics

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cards that i tested today on them but what you should be focusing on is

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the gtx 650 ti boost and the r7 260 x as

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they are the most comparable cards on that chart now one thing to note is that

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the 650 ti boost has been out for quite a while so it's been being optimized for

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a very long time and the 260x is very

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brand new running a beta driver and has not been being optimized for that long

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so we're likely to see the gap closing up a little bit in the future and

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another thing to note is that all r7 260 x's are two Gigabyte now while if you

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have one monitor that's 1080p or below that may not matter too much but if you

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want to personally prepare yourself for what you might do in the future getting

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more RAM on your card is a good idea because the second you add more monitors

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or go to higher resolutions or just general games in the future

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it'll help a lot to have that extra memory on board now as you guys have

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seen in the chart so far it's actually a pretty close fight but there is a little

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bit of differential there so if you liked the video like the video if you

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disliked the video dislike the video and in the comment section what do you think

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of mantle and what do you think it's going to do to the future of gaming be

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sure to subscribe to Linus tech tips

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you