GTX 780 Ti Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,405 words · ~12 min read
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Hotspot Shield service makes your internet browsing safer more secure and
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fully private click now to learn more there are a few things that get us more
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excited around here than highend graphics card launches and as far as
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single gpus go the GTX 780 Ti is about
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as high-end as it gets we'll start with the tech specs it has the same GK 110
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lineage and Titan DNA as the GTX Titan
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and the GTX 780 it also has a full
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2,880 Cuda cor that is 25% more than GTX
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780 that is a full-fledged gk10 core it
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is clocked at an 875 base clock
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928 boost clock clock speed meaning we have not only more Cuda cor but also
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higher clock speeds and it comes with 3 GB of gddr5 memory at 7 GHz on a 384-bit
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bus so we're actually getting faster memory as well physically the card looks pretty
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darn similar to the last gen so there's two SLI connectors with support for two
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three or four-way SLI you've got that same acoustically optimized fan with the
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slow ramp up and down so that it's less jarring when it has to speed up or slow
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down we've got a cast aluminum shroud
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with dark aluminum fins visible through the polycarbonate window so those are
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mounted on a vapor chamber that takes heat away from the GPU on the back of
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the card we have two dual link DVI ports HDMI and and DisplayPort now with
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support for 4K and triple surround however I maintain that this is pretty
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expensive and kind of irrelevant right now I think it's just a feature checkbox
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that they want to have compared to the competition we've yet to see a gaming
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rig with a 4k monitor on it posted on the line of tech tips Forum so I'm just
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not convinced that it exists yet at the bottom we find a PCI Express 3.0 16x
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connector and then at the top to correspond with that 250 W TDP we've got
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an 8 Pin and six pin power connector the
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cooler is a blower style design so while a little bit of heat is going to be
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exhausted out the back of the card into your case most of it is going to be
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exhausted out the rear of your PC case so that it doesn't affect the cooling of
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your other components we've got the usual suspects in terms of in-game
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Technology direct X11 ambient occlusion txaa tessellation fizx and there are
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some upcoming games and hot new titles that support these features on the
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screen right now hopefully there's no mention funnily enough of 3D Vision but
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don't worry guys it's still very much supported I just guess that that
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particular Trend didn't take off the way that TV manufacturers and some other
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folks hoped that it would gsync on the other hand is a game changer it looks
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dramatically better when the frame rate is variable at all which happens in
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every game as you move from more or less demanding scenes and in between them it
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dynamically adapts the refresh rate of your monitor that is how many images per
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second according to the frame rate actually being output from your GPU now
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it does rely on Hardware support but we're expecting to see monitors sometime
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in 2014 you'll also need a Kepler based GPU and hopefully from the manufacturers
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that you see here that are already partnered up we're going to see great high resolution High refresh rate
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designs with a variety of different panel types whether it's TN or IPS or
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whatever else and these are going to come in at reasonable prices because trust me guys I'm one of the several
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people on Earth that's actually seen this it is amazing and once you try it
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you are going to want it GPU boo 2.0
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functionality has been tweak somewhat with their power balancing feature and
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Luke will tell you more about that after but fundamentally the technology hasn't
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changed much so it's monitoring voltage temperatures power consumption and clock
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speeds in order to deliver the most balanced performance at any given time
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without exceeding any of those parameters now there's a difference
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between how AMD views balance performance and how NVIDIA views balance
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performance with this generation it runs substantially cooler and much quieter
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than the r9290 series but there were some things that we didn't necessarily
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like about this implementation there's very limited control in terms of
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voltages and uh Power limits it gives us a whopping 100 16% power limit maximum
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and even with things like temperature settings it seems to be ignoring what we
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say anyway we set a maximum of 95 degrees because we were like go to town
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I mean AMD set 95 degrees let's run at 95 degrees it didn't run at 95 Dees so
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it just ran at 83 degrees so it doesn't even seem to it seems to be taking our
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input as suggestions with that said we still achieved over 12200 MHz on the
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core so that is one hell of an overclock and very beastly performance as you guys
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are going to see so maybe it just runs at 83° and that's all there is to it
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this could be partly due to the larger die as well as the more mature design so
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a larger die allows you to inherently spread the heat out more easily using
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the heat sink GeForce experience continues to get updates but first the
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stuff that hasn't been changed it still gives you automatic driver update so you
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get a little notification in the corner hey you got that new game hey there's a
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new driver to go with it make sure you install that yay uh it also gives you
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optimized settings for your games and there's actually quite a complicated
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process to determine these actual people sit there and play the game find
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Benchmark segments that are demanding then they determine a Target frame rate
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for these demanding segments weigh Graphics settings against each other you
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know play around with the sliders well does this actually make it look that much better and how hard is it for the
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graphics Hardware to handle and then they find the best settings that satisfy
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the FPS Target and still make it look as good as possible then they run all that
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information through automated validation across thousands of Hardware
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configurations in order to deliver you a playable gaming experience I've tried it
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and it works um I ended up tweaking a couple things further but the great
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thing about GeForce experience is that you can have it deliver better graphical
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Fidelity to high-end Gamers who don't want to Tinker with things you can have
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it help low-end Gamers like you can see this example with a
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gt540m uh achieve playable frame rates even on low-end machines and most
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importantly for people like me who are going to tweak things anyway you can install it then come completely ignore
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it and do everything manually through the driver now on to the newer stuff now
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these next two features do require a GTX 650 or up you have to have a Kepler GPU
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with a built-in h264 encoder but man are they cool game stream is awesome I've
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been using an NVIDIA Shield to play Batman Arkham City because I'm a little
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bit behind on the Batman franchise um using the GTX Titan in my desktop PC and
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then a very solid wireless router guys a beast wireless router is required I'm
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using ASUS's AC n66u or whatever it is
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but it is amazing PC grade graphics on a
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handheld or with their new console mode for shield you can stream them to your
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TV at 720p or 1080p with an upcoming
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patch that's coming later on and when you factor in that with high-end graphics cards 77 up you can get $100
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off a shield that's a $200 add-on that is essentially a PC game console adapter
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thing for your TV and a handheld that can stream from your PC it's pretty
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freaking awesome and then next up is Shadow play right now it supports local
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recording only although Twitch streaming integrated into your graphics card
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driver essentially is coming soon it records at 60 FPS at up to 1080p so it's
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better than most Standalone Hardware recorders and it can just record
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passively in the background so you can kind of go oh well that was awesome I
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want to grab that and you can actually retroactively grab up to 20 minutes of
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pre-recorded footage in Windows 8 using their passive shadowplay mode or you can
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have unlimited recording in manual mode now it's not perfect it's like not
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perfect yet by all means but I mean there's no opengl support so no
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Minecraft guys but it has very very
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small file sizes and the quality looks great and it is a negligible less than
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10% performance impact so it's something that you can actually have running all
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the time which is very very cool for game streamers compared to software
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recording like fraps so that's it for the tech now on to Performance we ran
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all of our graphics cards on our standard overclocked 3960x test bench
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all video cards were overclocked as usual if you want stock benchmarks there
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are a hundred other guys that do things that way so go for it go look at their
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benchmarks you can see our overclocking settings in the Google Doc Link in the
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video description if you have any questions about how we overclocked the
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graphics cards or what frequencies they're running at we recorded frame
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rates using fraps after giving each graphics card a few minutes to warm up
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in game this is important because the way GPU boosts 2.0 and powertune adjust
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Performance Based on temperatures it's a necessary step for getting accurate GPU
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performance so without further Ado over to Luke just so you guys know the
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overclocking dock is linked in the description below and has all of our settings for all of our cards and just
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in case you haven't seen it yet on the far right side there's a new column that we introduced a little while ago called
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core clock actual which is displaying our observed clock speeds for the cars
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with GP boost 2 and all these new technologies they happen to throttle
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back quite easily so what we're showing is not what we set it at what we're
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showing is what it's actually performing as and our card is performing quite well
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at 1256 now now that's with an offset of
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plus 250 if I ignored the crashing that I was having in Tomb Raider at higher
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clock speeds I was pushing easily 300 the charts have been pretty
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self-explanatory thus far with the 70 TI pretty much crushing everything although
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that does make sense due to its much higher price point that's something you have to keep in mind the question that
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is most likely on quite a few of your minds is what happened to the Titan a
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it's not in your benchmarks B it's a slower card to see it's much more
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expensive well it's kind of a developer card now it's not really a gaming card
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anymore it has that double Precision feature on it which is kind of awesome
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for certain developers that can actually utilize it and other than that it's just
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kind of sitting up there by itself if you're looking for an extremely high-end
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gaming card and you were looking at the Titan I would maybe divert your focus to
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the 780ti you may need that 6 gigs of RAM I have noticed in some of our higher
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resolution benchmarks that it is starting to utilize a lot of the RAM and
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getting fairly close to its Max although not that close mind you so one thing to
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do if you need that extra RAM might be wait a little while and see if there's
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different versions of the 780 Ti coming out later we have no idea but I hope
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there is because that would be very interesting I'm sure a debate that will
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go on is is this card overkill for 1080p
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I would not say quite yet in Far Cry 3 and Crisis 3 with all the settings Max
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we don't get our average FPS over 60 and I would personally think that the
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perfect 1080p experience would be 60 FPS plus and with starson on the horizon we
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don't know what's going to happen there but it's probably going to push it even
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harder so I could still see this card being justified for 1080p but I might
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want to go a little bit higher and where this card really shows its prowess is in
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the higher resolutions our 2560 x600
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benchmarks were very impressive although again in Crisis 3 we saw a little bit
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sub30 for our average SPS so I would
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love to see two of these cards in s start crushing games in those higher
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resolutions this card is kicking butt and taking names but it definitely comes
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with a price tag in the comments below are you be looking for a card like this
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with a premium price tag but with that level of experience or are you going to
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go for something more like say an r9290
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where you can save a bunch of money and it's a little bit hot and heavy but
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you're still getting a lot of performance out of it what do you guys think if you like this video like the
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video If you dislike this video dislike this video and as always please
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