the Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or
liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more welcome
to another unboxing today we've got the Radeon
r7260x and what this card is if you don't feel like watching the rest of the
video is basically a Radeon 7790
but with some more features and with more performance so this is part of
AMD's new generation of products which they're calling the r7 and r9 series r7
refers to performance class gpus and r9
refers to enthusiast class gpus so what is the key difference well one is price
this sits in that sweet spot between 100 and 200 dollars where you can typically
get some of the best bang for the buck the other difference is in well
obviously performance so this card right here is not designed for you know three
by 1080p ifinity setups or anything like that this is for gaming in modern titles
at 1080p it has 896 stream processors it
has two gigs of RAM and it is clocked at 1.1
gigahertz on the core out of the box
which is very very cool because it's the fastest stock GPU speed we've ever seen
out of AMD it's got a typical board power of 115 watts so it's relatively
low power consumption and that is reflected by the single pci express six
pin connector on it you can also we'll do a quick tour of the card here where
you can see that the the stock reference card is going to have a flower style
heat sink so you can see there's going to be air flow coming from that single
80 millimeter fan that is going to be
just pushed down all over the card all over the memory in the vrm the vrm is
the only part of the board other than the GPU itself that has a heat sink
directly on it so you can see it's located up here near the front of the
board it uses pci express 3.0 for
connectivity although on cards of this caliber it doesn't really make much of a
difference and on the back we've got the typical AMD layout two dual link dvi
HDMI and DisplayPort but there's a big difference here AMD has changed the r7
and r9 series to allow three displays at 1080p 60 hertz running off of dvi dvi
and HDMI so you no longer need a displayport adapter very cool stuff next
up we've got the crossfire connector which is present on the 260x and the
back of the card where we don't see a whole lot there so let's talk about some
of the technologies that are included before we hand things over to slick to
tell us about the performance compared to the competition so number one is zero
core zero core refers to AMD's ability to basically turn the GPU entirely off
when you're not doing anything allowing you to save power when you're idling or
not doing much on your computer which let's face it a lot of computers do the
next feature that at the time of filming this video is completely unique to this
card is true audio which is a programmable dsp right on the graphics
card for you guys guessed it audio this allows
the sound engineers that work on your favorite games to offload that
processing that would normally be done on the CPU and have it done instead on
the GPU itself this means that you're going to be able to get much more
realistic audio effects so in particular convolution reverb is a technique that
uses what you'd kind of consider to be an image of a room and how sound should
behave in it so the materials it's made of the shape so that when you walk into
a dungeon it'll echo and the drips of water will bounce around off the walls
versus when you walk out it's a much more open feeling experience this has
been implemented in thief i saw a demo of it and it actually works it's the
first time we've seen any kind of real advancements in hardware sound for games
since eax so that's very very exciting
but right now just this card although guys stay tuned very soon there will be
at least another card or two with this feature implemented next up is mantle
this is really to me the big news about the r7 and r9 series of cards because
they're directx 11.2 cards which is an API so they're also compatible with
opengl and oh wait but mantle is now a third
API that AMD wants developers using they want to leverage the experience that
developers have developing games on the latest generation of consoles the ps4
and the xbox one to use that same type
of approach to program for desktop pc
gpus so what mantle does is it bypasses
directx and opengl completely forgets
about those and is actually a completely new way that the game engine can
interact almost directly with the card at a much lower level this should turn
into some very tangible performance improvements and i'm extremely excited
to see where this technology goes but there are some caveats because obviously
if we have game developers they you know they have to support directx a lot of
them support opengl and then now mantle and then what if NVIDIA had their own
and then what if Intel had their own for onboard graphics and all of a sudden
we've put a lot of extra load on the game devs well let's hope it doesn't go
down that path but for now AMD's telling
us that game devs have been asking them for this and in particular because of
their presence in every next-gen console
well it might actually succeed so that's extremely exciting there's a new fan
profile as well as an updated power tune so the fan profile allows much more
gradual ramp down and ramp up speeds of the fan so you don't hear that
when the temperatures are sitting on a threshold where it changes quite
frequently and power tune now accounts not only for GPU clock speed overall
board power and power consumption but also temperatures so this is much like
GPU boost 2.0 where you have a lot more granular control of how the card behaves
with that said overclocking has been simplified somewhat to the point where
all you really do now is adjust your maximum clock up and then the card will
run sort of wherever it can you can make some adjustments to the power limits of
the boards however the temperature limits come in pretty much set to their
maximums so the only way to really um you know leverage more overclocking
other than just turning that slider up is going to be to add better cooling to
your graphics card the raptor app is something that AMD is talking about a
fair bit which is a way of connecting with other gamers it's platform agnostic
it allows you to get rewards for playing and most importantly this is another
competitor for an NVIDIA technology they've had for a little while the
GeForce experience it allows you to with one button just say look optimize my
settings for this game i care more about the appearance of it or i care more
about the performance of it and it'll just figure out what you want and it
uses cloud-based data sourcing so it collects anonymous data from everyone
else running the game as well as the performance they're getting and then
optimizes your configuration based on other people who have similar hardware
who are running it acceptably finally guys never settle as always
games come with your card however stay tuned because never settle is changing
constantly so you're going to want to check out what your card comes with at
the time without further ado i'm going to hand this off to slit to tell you
guys about the performance of the r7 260x
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
cards that i tested today on them but what you should be focusing on is
the gtx 650 ti boost and the r7 260 x as
they are the most comparable cards on that chart now one thing to note is that
the 650 ti boost has been out for quite a while so it's been being optimized for
a very long time and the 260x is very
brand new running a beta driver and has not been being optimized for that long
so we're likely to see the gap closing up a little bit in the future and
another thing to note is that all r7 260 x's are two Gigabyte now while if you
have one monitor that's 1080p or below that may not matter too much but if you
want to personally prepare yourself for what you might do in the future getting
more RAM on your card is a good idea because the second you add more monitors
or go to higher resolutions or just general games in the future
it'll help a lot to have that extra memory on board now as you guys have
seen in the chart so far it's actually a pretty close fight but there is a little
bit of differential there so if you liked the video like the video if you
disliked the video dislike the video and in the comment section what do you think
of mantle and what do you think it's going to do to the future of gaming be
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