KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Today AMD release the first of their new graphics series and Kitguru is on hand to cover the R7 260X, R9 270X and R9 280X. This review focuses on a partner board, the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X which features enhanced clock speeds and a custom cooling solution. Is this the card you need to shortlist for a new upgrade?
Sapphire have earned a glowing reputation over the years by releasing some of the finest AMD graphics cards available. They are well known for taking an AMD reference design and improving upon it in every way possible.
While the rest of our launch articles today have been forced to focus on slightly disappointing reference designs AMD did authorise a review of the Sapphire R9 280X, featuring the highly regarded Vapor X cooler.
The reference AMD R9 280X will be sold with clock speeds up to 1ghz – all of which will have 2,048 Stream Processors. Memory speeds will be set up to 6.0 Gbps. The reference card will demand power from 1 x 6 pin and 1x 8 pin PCI E connectors and it complies with the PCI E 3.0 standard. Each card will ship with 3GB of GDDR5 clocked up to 6.0Gbps.
Sapphire have taken this reference card and turned it completely on its head with the design of their R9 280X Vapor X card. The small, substandard single red fan has been replaced with two larger fans encased behind a black shroud with substantial heatpipes leading into multiple racks of aluminum fins.
They have overclocked the core to 1,070mhz as well (with a BIOS switch), offering a modest performance boost over the reference card. Now, let us take a closer look at the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X card.
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X is a beefy dual slot solution, with two large nine blade fans covering most of the PCB. Nickel plated heatpipes are visible behind the fans, but we will take a closer look at the cooler shortly.
This card was supplied by AMD in a simple brown box, so we have no idea of what the retail box will contain. We would imagine it will include a Crossfire cable, some power and video converters and a software disc.
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X ships with a backplate in place. This not only helps to cool the card but will offer protection.
The R9 280X Vapor X is Crossfire capable in 2, 3 and 4 way configurations.
Sapphire have overhauled the power configuration of this particular R9 280X. The reference design has 1 x 6 pin and 1 x 8 pin PCI E power connectors but the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X takes 2 x 8 pin PCI E power cables.
The Sapphire R9 280X has a single DVI-I and DVI-D connector, and a full sized HDMI and DisplayPort connector.
R9 Series GPUs can now support up to three HDMI/DVI displays for use with AMD Eyefinity technology. A set of displays which support identical timings is required to enable this feature. The display clocks and timing for this feature are configured at boot time.
As such, display hot‐plugging is not supported for the third HDMI/DVI connection. A reboot is required to enable three HDMI/DVI displays.
DisplayPort outputs are supported in addition to the three HDMI/DVI displays (up to 6 in total).
There is a little button on this card which enhances the core clock speeds by 20mhz (from 1,050mhz to 1070mhz) and memory speeds by 50mhz (from 1,500mhz to 1550mhz). The image above shows the switch ‘enabled' – it glows blue.
Sapphire are using 3GB of SK Hynix GDDR5 memory. The VRM's are cooled by a dedicated heatsink. The memory is actively cooled by the main heatsink above.
The main cooler is certainly substantial, it has a copper core directly connected to four thick heatpipes which run into separate racks of aluminum fins – all actively cooled by the dual fan configuration above.
The Sapphire R9 280X is built on the 28nm process. It has 2,048 Steam Processors, 32 ROP's and 128 TMU's. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory is connected via a wide 384 bit memory interface. The GDDR5 is clocked at 1,500mhz (6Gbps effective).
Hang on. Do these specifications look identical to something we have seen before?
They should do, they are the same as the HD7970 GHZ Edition. The Device ID is the same, and the release date on both is ‘December 22nd, 2011'. The screen shot above was taken from our HD7970 GHZ Edition review back in July 2012. The technical specifications including shader layout, pixel and texture filtrate and bandwidth characteristics are identical.
On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.
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.
Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset.
A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.
Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.
Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:
- Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
- Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
- Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
- Multicore CPU support
- Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
- Powerful C++ API
- Comprehensive performance profiling system
- Flexible XML-based data structures
We use the settings shown above at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X slots in behind the highly overclocked Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, which isn't a surprise as the R9 280X is basically a HD7970 GHZ Edition. The GTX780 leads this chart by a considerable margin.
All cards scale as expected, holding positions.
Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.
We test with the settings above both at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.
Nvidia drivers seem better optimised for this engine as the Palit GTX770 moves into second spot.
The MSI GTX780 and Palit GTX770 lead the charts at 2560×1600.
Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X scores 40,779 points, around 2,500 points behind the GTX780 and highly overclocked Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.
3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.
After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.
The Sapphire R9 280X slots in right behind the Palit GTX770, scoring 10,687 in the graphics test within 3DMark 11.
3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance.
Futuremark say “Use it to test your PC’s limits and measure the impact of overclocking and tweaking your system. Search our massive results database and see how your PC compares or just admire the graphics and wonder why all PC games don’t look this good.
To get more out of your PC, put 3DMark in your PC.”
A very healthy score in 3DMark, 8,361 points in the Graphics test, just behind the overclocked HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.
Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.
To test the cards we used a 1920×1080 / 2560×1600 resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on.
The MSI GTX780 leads the chart, with the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition following closely behind.
Sleeping Dogs started development as an original title, but was announced in 2009 as True Crime: Hong Kong, the third installment and a reboot of the True Crime series. As a result of the game’s high development budget and delays, it was canceled by Activision Blizzard in 2011. Six months later, it was announced that Square Enix had picked up the publishing rights to the game, but the game was renamed Sleeping Dogs in 2012 since Square Enix did not purchase the True Crime name rights.
This game is still a system killer at these maximised settings. We test at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.
All of the graphics cards on test today can maintain smooth frame rates at 1920×1080 with these settings, but they all drop below 25 fps at 2560×1600. The enhanced overclock of the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition places it right behind the GTX780 at 1920×1080, but it claims the top position at 2560×1600. As we would expect the R9 280X is slightly slower than the HD7970 Toxic Edition.
Total War ROME 2 is the eighth stand alone game in the Total War series, it is the successor to the successful Rome: Total War title. The Warscape Engine powers the visuals of the game and the new unit cameras will allow players to focus on individual soldiers on the battlefield, which in itself may contain thousands of combatants at a time. Creative Assembly has stated that they wish to bring out the more human side of war this way, with soldiers reacting with horror as their comrades get killed around them and officers inspiring their men with heroic speeches before siege towers hit the walls of the enemy city. This will be realised using facial animations for individual units, adding a feel of horror and realism to the battles.
To test the cards today we use the ULTRA profile settings shown above at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 resolutions.
The Palit GTX770 holds well at 1920×1080, but at 2560×1600 it takes quite a performance hit, falling below the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X.Dirt Showdown is the latest title in the franchise from Codemasters, based around the famous Colin McRae racing game series, although it no longer uses his name, since he passed away in 2007.
Today we test the hardware at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600 with the Ultra profile and 8 x MSAA.
The GTX780 and Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition are closely matched in this engine, exchanging places between 1920×1080 and 2560×1600. The R9 280X is slightly slower than the R7970 6GB Toxic Edition, as we would expect given the lower clock speeds.
After a delayed release from late 2012 to March 2013, the game received much anticipation and hype. Tomb Raider received much acclaim from critics, who praised the graphics, the gameplay and Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara with many critics agreeing that the game is a solid and much needed reboot of the franchise. Much criticism went to the addition of the multiplayer which many felt was unnecessary. Tomb Raider went on to sell one million copies in forty-eight hours of its release, and has sold 3.4 million copies worldwide so far.
We use the ULTIMATE profile shown above and test at 1920×1080 and 2560×1600.
Strong performance from all the cards on test, the only card to fall below the 25 fps sweet spot is the GTX760 SC at 2560×1600. The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X is slightly slower than the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.
Metro: Last Light takes place one year after the events of Metro 2033, proceeding from the ending where Artyom chose to call down the missile strike on the Dark Ones. The Rangers have since occupied the D6 military facility, with Artyom having become an official member of the group. Khan, the nomad mystic, arrives at D6 to inform Artyom and the Rangers that a single Dark One survived the missile strike.
4A Games’ proprietary 4A Engine is capable of rendering breathtaking vistas, such as those showing the ruined remnants of Moscow, as well as immersive indoor areas that play with light and shadow, creating hauntingly beautiful scenes akin to those from modern-day photos of Pripyat’s abandoned factories and schools.
We test this game with the built in benchmark with very high quality settings at 1920×1080 – details shown in the image above.
The MSI GTX780 takes top position in this chart, ahead of the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition. The Palit GTX770 averages the same frame rate as the Sapphire R9 280X, but the minimum frame rate is slightly higher.
Grid 2 is the sequel to the racing video game Race Driver: Grid. It was developed and published by Codemasters. The game includes numerous real world locations such as Paris, numerous United States locations, and many more, and also includes motor vehicles spanning four decades. In addition, it includes a new handling system that developer Codemasters has dubbed ‘TrueFeel’, which aims to hit a sweet spot between realism and accessibility.
We test at 1920×1080 with the Ultra image quality preset, as shown above. 8x MSAA was enabled to improve image quality.
No problems powering this game at either resolution, even with 8MSAA enabled. The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X slots in behind the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, as expected.Splinter Cell Blacklist is the sixth installment in the series.
The game begins with Sam Fisher and his old friend Victor Coste who are about to depart from Andersen AFB in Guam when an unknown enemy force destroys the entire base. Assisted by hacker specialist Charlie Cole, Sam and Vic manage to escape, although Vic is injured after protecting Sam from a grenade. Soon after, a terrorist group calling itself “The Engineers” assumes responsibility for the attack and announce that it was the first of a deadly countdown of escalating attacks (called “The Blacklist”) on United States assets, declaring that they will halt the attacks only after the U.S. government accomplish the demand of calling back all American troops deployed abroad.
Blacklist had some performance issues until Nvidia released the 326.80 beta driver, which we are using today.
We test with a series of high image quality settings as shown above and with 4x MSAA and 16 x Anisotropic filtering enabled.
The Nvidia hardware is strong in this test, taking the top two positions. The R9 280X Vapor X performs slightly worse than the HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.
The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes.Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis Warhead for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature.
We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.
The Vapor X cooler handles the task admirably, peaking at 63c load in our environment. These results are around 6-7c better than the HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition.
We have changed our method of measuring noise levels.
We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.
Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.
Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.
KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum
The Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X cooler is much quieter than the previous HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition model, which was well known to be quite loud under load, especially with the ‘lethal boost' bios enabled.
To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis Warhead and record the results.
There is no doubt that the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition was one of the most powerful HD7970's ever released, but it is a power sucking beast. Sapphire increased the GPU Voltage, enhanced the clock speeds significantly and added another 3GB of GDDR5 – all combined these ensure a high power drain. The new R9 280X Vapor X by comparison seems modest in its power requirements.
For our overclocking tests today we used the latest version of MSI Afterburner, which is based around Rivatuner.
There wasn't very much headroom on our sample – around 70mhz on the core above the TURBO Sapphire setting. This translated into a 9% overclock. We tried overclocking with other software packages and various voltage settings, but this was our stable limit.
We used software to analyse memory artifacting, and this started just after 1,578mhz. If we owned this board I would leave the memory speeds running as Sapphire set it up in the OC BIOS, just to include a little margin for stability.
Unlike the other launch reviews today, AMD never sent us a reference sample of the R9 280X so we have been unable to offer any direct head to head comparisons with the custom Sapphire Vapor X model. There is no doubt that the Vapor X cooler is one of the main selling points to our readers, especially as AMD reference coolers usually offer very little of note for the enthusiast gamer.
As we mentioned earlier in the review, the R9 280X Vapor X is basically a reflashed HD7970 GHZ Edition brought into 2013. The shader configuration, Pixel, Texture filrate and bandwidth specifications are identical, including the release date of Dec 22, 2011 and Device ID of 1002-6798. Check out our GPUZ screenshots on the second page of this review for verification.
Many enthusiast users will be asking why AMD didn't release a brand new board to take on Nvidia in the high end. Right now the GTX780 has no competition, unless you include the recent price cuts on the dual GPU HD7990 flagship. We will have to wait on the AMD R9 290X to see what they have up their sleeves in the coming weeks.
As far as the R9 280X is concerned, it offers identical performance to the HD7970 GHZ Edition – which we reviewed way back in July 2012. I have to admit I find it unusual that AMD didn't launch the R9 290X first, as it seems to the model that should be leading the way.
Thankfully this review can be taken from a slightly different viewpoint. Sapphire have replaced the reference R9 280X cooler with a Vapor X model which performs exceptionally well. There is also a dual BIOS switch which increases the core clock speed from 1,050mhz to 1,070mhz and the memory speeds from 1,500mhz (6.0Gbps effective) to 1,550mhz (6.2Gbps). Not a huge clock improvement, but every little counts.
For our review today we decided to include the Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition, one of the fastest HD7970's ever released. This card unsurprisingly outperforms the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X, but it does generate a lot more noise and heat due to the fact that the board received a voltage increase at the time.
No one argued that the HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition wasn't a stunning card however the noise levels did cause concern at the time. In this regard, the new board has the edge … although even with manual overclocking the R9 280X can't quite reach the same clock figures.
Overclocking the Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X didn't prove to be incredibly successful. We already knew from past experiences that the HD7970 was often limited to between 1,100mhz and 1,150mhz and our review sample hit a hardlock clock speed just below 1,150mhz. The GDDR5 memory is also almost clocked to the limit, we managed to only squeeze another 30 mhz before minor artifacting would occur.
Pricing of the R9 280X will be instrumental in regards to sales success. AMD have told the press that the R9 280X will be sold for $299.
This directly translates into £190 UK pre VAT. With £38 UK VAT added we have a final price of around £230. We spoke with several retailers just before launch and we were told prices would be between £249 and £289 inc vat, so again UK punters have to pay extra. With overclocked, custom HD7970's already available for £230 inc vat, it might be a difficult sell for AMD partners. Again, pricing tends to shift a lot in the coming weeks after launch, so it is best to keep watching leading online retailers.
In closing, this Sapphire R9 280X Vapor X is undoubtedly a powerful graphics card but in reality it won't offer anything new to gamers who were already contemplating the purchase of a custom, overclocked HD7970. No matter what way you look at this, it is a disappointing scenario for AMD to end 2013.
We hope the R9 290/X brings something fresh, new and exciting to the table.
Pros:
- Vapor X cooler is fantastic.
- Dual bios.
- relatively quiet under load.
- fantastic performance at 2560×1600.
Cons:
- Not much headroom on our sample.
- HD7970 anyone?
Kitguru says: A high performance, supremely cooled custom card from Sapphire, but no matter what way you look at it, AMD releasing a HD7970 GHZ rehash in 2013 is disappointing.
