Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X Review

For our review today we are using the latest Catalyst 13.11 and Forceware 331.40 drivers. These drivers have the latest performance enhancements and bug fixes.

We are using one of our brand new test rigs supplied by PCSPECIALIST and built to our specifications. If you want to read more about this, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page.

We test the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X today with the Turbo switch enabled. This increases the core speed from 1,050mhz to 1,070mhz and the memory speeds from 1,500mhz (6GBps effective) to 1,550mhz (6.2Gbps effective).

We are using a Dell 3011 monitor for this review. We test at both 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.

Comparison cards:
eVGA GTX760 SC (1072mhz core / 1502mhz memory)

Palit GTX770 (1046mhz core / 1753mhz memory)

MSI GTX780 (863mhz core / 1502mhz memory)
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition (lethal boost enabled) (1200mhz core / 1600mhz memory)

Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Rome 2
Dirt Showdown
Tomb Raider
Metro Last Light
GRID 2
Alien V Predator
Splinter Cell Blacklist

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

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