 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 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 butt 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 bowing and breaking something. So there's also a backplate. Look at that, like full metal backplate that also doubles as a bit of a heat sink for some of the VRM components that are on the other side. You can also see the way that their cooler is designed is to not necessarily just direct airflow down at the card, but you see this pyramid shape right here that directs airflow 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 60 millimeter 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 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'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 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 a 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 eight 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 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 four, they'll even recommend three gigs of graphics memory. So it's basically the card to get for the sort of maximum gaming experience right, absolutely right now and in the near future. Whereas if you stepped up to something like an R9 290 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 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, and 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 iFINITY 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 display port 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 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'll 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? And 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 gigahertz 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've benchmarked so far. Now one thing you're going 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 780 for now because the 780's competition is TBD, yet to be released. That's not the acronym for yet to be released, but don't worry about it. It sits up there really, really strong against some of its higher priced competition actually, which is nice to see. Checking 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 dislike this video, dislike it, bring it on, that's okay. And comment on the video, what do you think about this new format with Linus starting it and me ending it and all that kind of stuff. And if you like all of Linus Tech Tips videos, be sure to subscribe.