Gadgetory

the BitFenix prodigy M is compact and ready for anything click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing and performance review of the Radeon r9 280x 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 liked their wind force 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 wind force 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 at 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 bowing 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 heatsink for some of the vrm components there on the other side you can also see the way that they're cooler is designed is to not necessarily just direct airflow 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 a three main segments of heatsink on here and three a 60 millimeter cooling fans speaking of fans and cooling let's talk about some things that have been updated on the 280x so number one is that power tune 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 GPU boost 2.0 technology it also means that you can control things like say oh I want my graphics card to run it 80 degrees or 70 degrees 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 onion sort of experience when you're launching games are 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 eight pin PCI Express connector and a 6 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 three gigs of memory so that makes it pretty much optimal for 2560 by 1440 gaming at high details and if you look at some of the next-gen titles like battlefield 4 they'll even recommend three 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 up to something like in our 92 90 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 79 70 gigahertz 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 at AMD says deads have been asking for this for ages to program more directly to the card rather than going through a bottleneck such as DirectX 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 AI Finity using two DVI ports and an HDMI port however this particular card doesn't implement two DVI ports so you're still going to need to use a display port adapter however the cool thing is that DisplayPort adapters you can now get relatively inexpensive splitter 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 the bundle because 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 and 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 slide that goes a cable 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 79 70 gigahertz edition but if you want to see the performance numbers compared to the current competitive landscape and 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 have benchmarked so far now one thing you to notice with this card the r9 280x 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 Semin 84 now because the 780 s competition is TBD yet to be released that's not the acronym of fir yet to be released but don't worry about it it's it's up there really really strong 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 liked this video like the video if you dislike this video dislike it bring it on that's ok and comment on the video what do you think about this new format with line of starting it me ending it and all that kind of stuff and if you like all of line is tech tips videos be sure to subscribe