The Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Review
by Ryan Smith on October 10, 2013 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Radeon
- Sapphire
- Tahiti
- Radeon 200
Gaming Performance
As far as gaming performance is concerned, as the highest clocked 280X card we’ve reviewed there’s actually not a lot to say about performance. The card will flat-out outperform every other 280X and it will even outperform NVIDIA’s GTX 770 on average. As we’ll see in our overclocking section, at stock it even outperforms our 280X cards when overclocked. So Sapphire certainly won’t be lacking in performance here.
Finally, please note that since we don’t have a reference 280X here, we’ll be using XFX’s 280X – a stock clockspeed part – as a proxy.
CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 |
Monitor: | Asus PQ321 + Samsung 305T |
Video Cards: |
Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Toxic XFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation Asus Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 |
Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA 331.40 Beta AMD Catalyst 13.11 Beta 1 |
OS: | Windows 8.1 Pro |
In the end Sapphire’s 280X Toxic is 13% faster than a stock clocked 280X. The stock 280X is usually boosting to near its maximum levels, so the performance gains from Sapphire’s overclock trends closer to the theoretical gains from the gains in the boost clock as opposed to the theoretical gains from the base GPU overclock. This also means it’s several percent faster than the GTX 770 on average, while still costing $50 less; though this won’t account for any factory overclocked GTX 770s that we’ve seen are out there.
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i7 - Sunday, November 17, 2013 - link
I bought a MSI R9 280X GAMING and it overclocks and cost less and has a 3 year warrenty. Good article though. Find it hard to believe that Sapphire decided not to include some OC room on this card.psychok9 - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
Hi staff, what's the problem with this card? You've typed wrong numbers?Shipping Core Clock 1100MHz vs Overclock Core Clock 1100MHz
I hope it's a bad typing... can you correct it?
psychok9 - Monday, December 2, 2013 - link
My bad... :) nevermind... the gpu most unlucky in the world.shammialwis - Tuesday, December 10, 2013 - link
I wonder if I can run this beast on my aerocool strike-x 600w 80plus bronze psu without any issues.. Help me people....