the bit Phoenix Prodigy m is Compact and ready for anything click now to learn
more welcome to my unboxing and performance review of the Radeon R9 28x
this particular one is unfortunately not quite in a retail box but you know it
was close the outer box art wasn't done and the accessory package hasn't been
finalized but this is a windforce card
from Gigabyte I actually quite like their windforce cooler I saw a great
demo of it at computex where they were basically taking synthetic heat loads
and showing against some of the competition just how much heat this
cooler can dissipate and it is a metric
but ton they have also done a great job of the industrial design of this
particular windforce card compared to ones I've seen in the past with a nice
sexy metal support bracket right here that actually makes a big difference to
the overall look of the card and is functional as well so what a support
bracket like this does is when you install the card in your system it's
only affixed by a screw here and the
slot here that's about it so it's typical to see a lot of flex well this
adds rigidity and makes it so that doesn't happen as much so there's less
risk of it flexing and Bo and breaking something so there's also a back plate
look at that like full metal back plate that also doubles as a bit of a heat
sink for some of the vrm components they're on the other side you can also
see the way that their cooler is designed is to not necessarily just
direct air flow down at the card but you see this pyramid shape right here that
directs air flow down through the fins to a greater extent as well as away from
the card so this will throw some cooling down here to the PCI Express slot as
well as up here away from the card now overall the design of this card is such
that most of the air is going to be exhausted inside your case so even
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
heat pipes that go from one side all the way to the other side of the card I hope
you guys can get a pretty good look at that and there's three main segments of
heat sink on here and three 60mm cooling
fans speaking of fans and cooling let's
talk about some of the things that have been updated on the 280X so number one
is that powertune has been upgraded to not only account for GPU clock speed and
voltage as well as the overall power usage of the board but also temperature
now so that means that having a better cooling implementation on your card will
result in tangibly better performance just like with NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0
technology it also means that you can control things like say oh I want my
graphics card to run at 80° or 70° and
you can make compromises depending on whether you prefer more performance or
if you prefer lower temperatures and more longevity for your graphics card
they've also updated the fan curve profiles so that they're not just
straight fan curves anymore there's some logic built into them now that makes it
so that the fans ramp up and down slower because it's been shown it's been proven
that people notice noise but they especially notice changes in noise so
making them more gradual will make it less of a
you sort of experience when you're launching games or not doing anything
intensive speaking of not doing anything intensive zero core technology is
implemented so that means the graphics card can basically turn the GPU off when
it's not doing anything allowing you to save power speaking of power at the back
of the board we've got an pin PCI Express connector and a six pin PCI
Express connector and also speaking of power yeah with all those connectors
we're looking at about 250 watts of typical board power and it's of course
going to be more if you're overclocking which has been simplified a fair bit
because there aren't many sliders to adjust anymore because you're going to
often be power limited by the board itself you're going to pretty much turn
up the dial in terms of your clock speed and it'll go wherever it goes just
remember guys having a better cooler does indeed help in this case now what
about the overall positioning of this card it's about a $300 graphics card it
has 3 gigs of memory so that makes it pretty much optimal for 260x 1440 gaming
at high details and if you look at some of the nextg titles like Battlefield 4
they'll even recommend 3 gigs of Graphics memory so it's basically the
card to get for the maximum gaming experience right absolutely right now
and in the near future whereas if you stepped up to something like an r9290
series you might be future proofing a little bit more although I hate using
that particular word true audio is not included because this is basically a
7970 GHz Edition and because it wasn't
implemented on that card at the time then there's no way to really add it to
this one after the fact it does have support however for AMD's mantle API
which leverages the technology that now exists on desktop PCS with the gcn
architecture and also in Xbox One PS4
and Wii U so the idea is to allow game
developers and AMD says Debs have been asking for this for ages to program more
directly to the card rather than going through a bottleneck such as direct X so
because they're going to be doing a lot of this work on those consoles anyway
devs that Implement mantle support for their games could be looking at
significant performance improvements on AMD Hardware on the PC stay tuned for
more we don't know how this is going to shake down but Battlefield 4 is going to
be adding mantle support in December of this year as of the latest updates let's
move along to the io at the back AMD has added support for ifinity using two DVI
ports and an HDMI port however this particular card doesn't Implement 2 DVI
ports so you're still going to need to use a DisplayPort adapter however the
cool thing is that DisplayPort adapters you can now get relatively inexpensive
Splitters so you could actually run three displays off of each of these no
big deal which I think is pretty darn cool never settle still a thing so
you're going to be able to get games with your cards guys I don't want to
give too many details about about the bundle cuz at some point this video will be old and that'll be irrelevant but you
can go ahead and check it out there will be a pricing and availability Link in the video description below and the
Raptor app is a new co-branding exercise that is designed to go with these cards
it'll actually automatically install with your driver if you allow it to when
you install your graphics drivers and it allows you to communicate with your
gamer friends across platforms open up applications without closing your game
window it allows you to actually stream
on demand whenever you feel like it so using services such as twitch TV and it
gives you optimized settings for your games Based on data that it collects
from other Gamers what kind of Hardware do they have what kind of settings are
they running at you can actually select a slider that goes okay well I want the best image quality and I'm willing to
sacrifice performance or completely the opposite I want maximum performance no
matter what so this is very similar to what NVIDIA has done with the GeForce
experience so without further Ado basically guys it's a 7970 GHz Edition
but if you want to see the performance numbers compared to the current competitive landscape I'm handing it off
to Slick to tell you all about it the charts on screen are very general and
just show the cards that I benchmarked so far now one thing you're going to
notice with this card the r9280x which you probably know because you clicked on
this video is that it sits up there at the top with the 780 now you can
probably just ignore the 780 for now because the 780s competition is TBD yet
to be released um that's not the acronym
for yet to be released but don't worry about it um it sits up there really
really strong I against some of its higher priced competition actually which
is nice to see benchmarking this card was really nice because as the
benchmarks came out I was excited every single time because they were very
strong for its price point it was good to see if you're someone who's looking
for a new AMD card because you want to say get Battlefield 4 and you're worried
about performance of your current rig this is something to pay attention to
it's quite strong and very well lined up on the performance charts and will be
optimized even more in the future if you like this video like the video If you
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