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the bit Phoenix Prodigy m is Compact and ready for anything click now to learn

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more welcome to my unboxing and performance review of the Radeon R9 28x

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this particular one is unfortunately not quite in a retail box but you know it

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was close the outer box art wasn't done and the accessory package hasn't been

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finalized but this is a windforce card

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from Gigabyte I actually quite like their windforce cooler I saw a great

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demo of it at computex where they were basically taking synthetic heat loads

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and showing against some of the competition just how much heat this

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cooler can dissipate and it is a metric

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but ton they have also done a great job of the industrial design of this

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particular windforce card compared to ones I've seen in the past with a nice

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sexy metal support bracket right here that actually makes a big difference to

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the overall look of the card and is functional as well so what a support

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bracket like this does is when you install the card in your system it's

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only affixed by a screw here and the

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slot here that's about it so it's typical to see a lot of flex well this

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adds rigidity and makes it so that doesn't happen as much so there's less

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risk of it flexing and Bo and breaking something so there's also a back plate

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look at that like full metal back plate that also doubles as a bit of a heat

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sink for some of the vrm components they're on the other side you can also

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see the way that their cooler is designed is to not necessarily just

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direct air flow down at the card but you see this pyramid shape right here that

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directs air flow down through the fins to a greater extent as well as away from

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the card so this will throw some cooling down here to the PCI Express slot as

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well as up here away from the card now overall the design of this card is such

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that most of the air is going to be exhausted inside your case so even

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though there's a vent at the back you're going to want to make sure you have great case cooling it's got three large

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heat pipes that go from one side all the way to the other side of the card I hope

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you guys can get a pretty good look at that and there's three main segments of

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heat sink on here and three 60mm cooling

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fans speaking of fans and cooling let's

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talk about some of the things that have been updated on the 280X so number one

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is that powertune has been upgraded to not only account for GPU clock speed and

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voltage as well as the overall power usage of the board but also temperature

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now so that means that having a better cooling implementation on your card will

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result in tangibly better performance just like with NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0

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technology it also means that you can control things like say oh I want my

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graphics card to run at 80° or 70° and

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you can make compromises depending on whether you prefer more performance or

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if you prefer lower temperatures and more longevity for your graphics card

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they've also updated the fan curve profiles so that they're not just

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straight fan curves anymore there's some logic built into them now that makes it

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so that the fans ramp up and down slower because it's been shown it's been proven

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that people notice noise but they especially notice changes in noise so

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making them more gradual will make it less of a

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you sort of experience when you're launching games or not doing anything

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intensive speaking of not doing anything intensive zero core technology is

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implemented so that means the graphics card can basically turn the GPU off when

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it's not doing anything allowing you to save power speaking of power at the back

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of the board we've got an pin PCI Express connector and a six pin PCI

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Express connector and also speaking of power yeah with all those connectors

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we're looking at about 250 watts of typical board power and it's of course

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going to be more if you're overclocking which has been simplified a fair bit

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because there aren't many sliders to adjust anymore because you're going to

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often be power limited by the board itself you're going to pretty much turn

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up the dial in terms of your clock speed and it'll go wherever it goes just

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remember guys having a better cooler does indeed help in this case now what

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about the overall positioning of this card it's about a $300 graphics card it

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has 3 gigs of memory so that makes it pretty much optimal for 260x 1440 gaming

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at high details and if you look at some of the nextg titles like Battlefield 4

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they'll even recommend 3 gigs of Graphics memory so it's basically the

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card to get for the maximum gaming experience right absolutely right now

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and in the near future whereas if you stepped up to something like an r9290

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series you might be future proofing a little bit more although I hate using

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that particular word true audio is not included because this is basically a

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7970 GHz Edition and because it wasn't

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implemented on that card at the time then there's no way to really add it to

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this one after the fact it does have support however for AMD's mantle API

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which leverages the technology that now exists on desktop PCS with the gcn

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architecture and also in Xbox One PS4

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and Wii U so the idea is to allow game

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developers and AMD says Debs have been asking for this for ages to program more

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directly to the card rather than going through a bottleneck such as direct X so

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because they're going to be doing a lot of this work on those consoles anyway

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devs that Implement mantle support for their games could be looking at

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significant performance improvements on AMD Hardware on the PC stay tuned for

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more we don't know how this is going to shake down but Battlefield 4 is going to

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be adding mantle support in December of this year as of the latest updates let's

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move along to the io at the back AMD has added support for ifinity using two DVI

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ports and an HDMI port however this particular card doesn't Implement 2 DVI

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ports so you're still going to need to use a DisplayPort adapter however the

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cool thing is that DisplayPort adapters you can now get relatively inexpensive

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Splitters so you could actually run three displays off of each of these no

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big deal which I think is pretty darn cool never settle still a thing so

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you're going to be able to get games with your cards guys I don't want to

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give too many details about about the bundle cuz at some point this video will be old and that'll be irrelevant but you

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can go ahead and check it out there will be a pricing and availability Link in the video description below and the

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Raptor app is a new co-branding exercise that is designed to go with these cards

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it'll actually automatically install with your driver if you allow it to when

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you install your graphics drivers and it allows you to communicate with your

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gamer friends across platforms open up applications without closing your game

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window it allows you to actually stream

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on demand whenever you feel like it so using services such as twitch TV and it

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gives you optimized settings for your games Based on data that it collects

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from other Gamers what kind of Hardware do they have what kind of settings are

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they running at you can actually select a slider that goes okay well I want the best image quality and I'm willing to

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sacrifice performance or completely the opposite I want maximum performance no

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matter what so this is very similar to what NVIDIA has done with the GeForce

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experience so without further Ado basically guys it's a 7970 GHz Edition

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but if you want to see the performance numbers compared to the current competitive landscape I'm handing it off

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to Slick to tell you all about it the charts on screen are very general and

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just show the cards that I benchmarked so far now one thing you're going to

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notice with this card the r9280x which you probably know because you clicked on

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this video is that it sits up there at the top with the 780 now you can

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probably just ignore the 780 for now because the 780s competition is TBD yet

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to be released um that's not the acronym

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for yet to be released but don't worry about it um it sits up there really

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really strong I against some of its higher priced competition actually which

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is nice to see benchmarking this card was really nice because as the

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benchmarks came out I was excited every single time because they were very

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strong for its price point it was good to see if you're someone who's looking

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for a new AMD card because you want to say get Battlefield 4 and you're worried

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about performance of your current rig this is something to pay attention to

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it's quite strong and very well lined up on the performance charts and will be

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optimized even more in the future if you like this video like the video If you

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dislike this video dislike it bring it on that's okay and comment on the video

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what do you think about this new format with lus starting it and me ending it

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and all that kind of stuff and if you like all of lus techtips videos be sure

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to subscribe