 The Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or liquid cooling. Check the link in the video description to learn more. Welcome to another unboxing. Today we've got the Radeon R7 260X. And what this card is, if you don't feel like watching the rest of the video, is basically a Radeon 7790 but with some more features and with more performance. So this is part of AMD's new generation of products which they're calling the R7 and R9 series. R7 refers to performance class GPUs and R9 refers to enthusiast class GPUs. So what is the key difference? Well one is price. This sits in that sweet spot between $100 and $200 where you can typically get some of the best bang for the buck. The other difference is in, well, obviously performance. So this card right here is not designed for, you know, 3x1080P i-affinity setups or anything like that. This is for gaming in modern titles at 1080p. It has 896 stream processors, it has 2 gigs of RAM, and it is clocked at 1.1 GHz on the core out of the box. Which is very, very cool because it's the fastest stock GPU speed we've ever seen out of AMD. It's got a typical board power of 115 watts so it's relatively low power consumption and that is reflected by the single PCI Express 6-pin connector on it. You can also, we'll do a quick tour of the card here where you can see that the stock reference card is going to have a flower style heatsink. So you can see there's going to be airflow coming from that single 80mm fan that is going to be just pushed down all over the card, all over the memory and the VRM. The VRM is the only part of the board other than the GPU itself that has a heatsink directly on it. So you can see it's located up here near the front of the board. It uses PCI Express 3.0 for connectivity, although on cards of this caliber it doesn't really make much of a difference. And on the back we've got the typical AMD layout, 2 dual link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. But there's a big difference here. AMD has changed the R7 and R9 series to allow 3 displays at 1080p 60Hz running off of DVI, DVI and HDMI so you no longer need a DisplayPort adapter. Very cool stuff. Next up we've got the Crossfire connector which is present on the 260x and the back of the card where we don't see a whole lot there. So let's talk about some of the technologies that are included before we hand things over to Slick to tell us about the performance compared to the competition. So number one is Zerocore. Zerocore refers to AMD's ability to basically turn the GPU entirely off when you're not doing anything, allowing you to save power when you're idling or not doing much on your computer, which let's face it, a lot of computers do. The next feature that at the time of filming this video is completely unique to this card is True Audio which is a programmable DSP right on the graphics card for, you guys guessed it, audio. This allows the sound engineers that work on your favorite games to offload that processing that would normally be done on the CPU and have it done instead on the GPU itself. This means that you're going to be able to get much more realistic audio effects. So in particular, convolution reverb is a technique that uses what you'd kind of consider to be an image of a room and how sound should behave in it. So the materials it's made of, the shape, so that when you walk into a dungeon, it'll echo and the drips of water will bounce around off the walls versus when you walk out, it's a much more open feeling experience. This has been implemented in Thief. I saw a demo of it and it actually works. It's the first time we've seen any kind of real advancements in hardware sound for games since EAX. So that's very, very exciting. But right now, just this card, although guys stay tuned very soon, there will be at least another card or two with this feature implemented. Next up is Mantle. This is really to me the big news about the R7 and R9 series of cards because they're DirectX 11.2 cards, which is an API. So they're also compatible with OpenGL. And oh, wait, but Mantle is now a third API that AMD wants developers using. They want to leverage the experience that developers have developing games on the latest generation of consoles, the PS4 and the Xbox One, to use that same type of approach to program for desktop PC GPUs. So what Mantle does is it bypasses DirectX and OpenGL, completely forgets about those, and is actually a completely new way that the game engine can interact almost directly with the card at a much lower level. This should turn into some very tangible performance improvements. And I'm extremely excited to see where this technology goes. But there are some caveats because obviously, if we have game developers, they have to support DirectX. A lot of them support OpenGL and then now Mantle. And then what if Nvidia had their own? And then what if Intel had their own for onboard graphics? And all of a sudden, we've put a lot of extra load on the game devs. Well, let's hope it doesn't go down that path. But for now, AMD is telling us that game devs have been asking them for this. And in particular, because of their presence in every next gen console, well, it might actually succeed. So that's extremely exciting. There's a new fan profile as well as an updated power tune. So the fan profile allows much more gradual ramp down and ramp up speeds of the fan. So you don't hear that when the temperatures are sitting on a threshold where it changes quite frequently. And power tune now accounts not only for GPU clock speed, overall board power and power consumption, but also temperatures. So this is much like GPU Boost 2.0, where you have a lot more granular control of how the card behaves. With that said, overclocking has been simplified somewhat to the point where all you really do now is adjust your maximum clock up. And then the card will run sort of wherever it can. You can make some adjustments to the power limits of the boards. However, the temperature limits come in pretty much set to their maximums. So the only way to really, you know, leverage more overclocking other than just turning that slider up is going to be to add better cooling to your graphics card. The Raptor app is something that AMD is talking about a fair bit, which is a way of connecting with other gamers. It's platform agnostic. It allows you to get rewards for playing. And most importantly, this is another competitor for an Nvidia technology they've had for a little while, the GeForce experience. It allows you to, with one button, just say, look, optimize my settings for this game. I care more about the appearance of it or I care more about the performance of it. And it'll just figure out what you want. And it uses cloud based data sourcing. So it collects anonymous data from everyone else running the game as well as the performance they're getting and then optimizes your configuration based on other people who have similar hardware who are running it acceptably. Finally, guys, never settle. As always, games come with your card, however, stay tuned because Never Settle is changing constantly. So you're going to want to check out what your card comes with at the time. Without further ado, I'm going to hand this off to Slick to tell you guys about the performance of the R7 260x. The charts are going to see here in a moment are going to be quite general. They're going to have all the graphics cards that I tested today on them. But what you should be focusing on is the GTX 650 Ti Boost and the R7 260x as they are the most comparable cards on that chart. Now, one thing to note is that the 650 Ti Boost has been out for quite a while, so it's been being optimized for a very long time. And the 260x is very brand new running a beta driver and has not been being optimized for that long. So we're likely to see the gap closing up a little bit in the future. And another thing to note is that all R7 260x are 2GB. Now, while if you have one monitor that's 1080p or below, that may not matter too much. But if you want to personally prepare yourself for what you might do in the future, getting more RAM on your card is a good idea. Because the second you add more monitors or go to higher resolutions or just general games in the future, it'll help a lot to have that extra memory on board. As you guys have seen in the charts so far, it's actually a pretty close fight, but there is a little bit of differential there. So if you like the video, like the video. If you dislike the video, dislike the video. And in the comment section, what do you think of Mantle and what do you think it's going to do to the future of gaming? Be sure to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.