Introduction

AMD's Radeon R9 280X has been on the market since October last year, but it wasn't really a new product even back then. The card is basically a rebranded HD 7970 GHz Edition with a slightly lower GPU clock, which essentially makes the it a 2 1/2 year old product. Nevertheless, the card still satisfies when it comes to driving 1080p displays at maximum details in all the latest games.

Based on the 28 nm "Tahiti" silicon, the Radeon R9 280X features 2,048 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext architecture, 128 texture memory units (TMUs), 32 raster operations units (ROPs), and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 3 GB. AMD's reference clock speeds for the chip are 1000 MHz on the core and 1500 MHz (6.00 GT/s effective) on memory, which results in 288 GB/s of memory bandwidth.



Today, we are reviewing the MSI R9 280X Gaming 6 GB, which doubles the memory from 3 GB to 6 GB, promising improved performance at higher resolutions. The card is also overclocked out of the box and comes with MSI's signature TwinFrozr cooling solution. Right now, the MSI R9 280X Gaming 6 GB is available for $400 online, a quite significant price premium over standard 3 GB variants.