MSI Gaming R9 280X OC Edition Review

Published by Hiwa Pouri on 03.02.14
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Conclusion


General + -
With the Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition, MSI is offering a R9 280X graphics card based on a Radeon HD 7970 reference PCB design paired up with their own new cooling solution. Overall, the Twin Frozr Gaming R9 280X OC Edition did good in our testing, performance was in line with what we expected it to be, cooling performance is very good mostly thanks to the Twin Frozr IV cooler which makes the card very silent as well as offers very good design.
As always we would have liked to see the manufacturer overclock the memory and it would have been nice to get a higher factory overclocking on the GPU as well.
  - Performance
- Cooling performance
- Design
- Noise levels
- Bundle
- Memory Clock
 
Cooling / Noise Level   + -
MSI's Twin Frozr IV cooler did a very good job on the Radeon R9 280X. The cooling performance was on a good level and so were the noise levels too. In idle conditions the card is inaudible and under load, the noise level can be described as very silent.   - Cooling performance
- Noise levels
 
Performance   + -
Overall the 3D performance is good, but as said previously, we would like MSI to push the factory clock a bit further in order to improve performance of its card and make it stand out from the masses. Because of the slight overclock of 50 MHz, we are looking at roughtly 2% performance gain.

Idle power consumption of the MSI card is rather high, since we measured 65 Watts on the wall, which is a whopping 19 Watts more than what we have seen with other Radeon R9 280X cards lately. Also, the load power consumption is high with 358 Watt. This is between 23 and 37 Watt more than other models.
  - Performance - Power consumption
 
Recommendation / Price   + -
If we look at prices on Geizhals.at we find that the MSI Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition goes for 263 Euro. These days, the cheapest R9 280X graphics cards are available for roughly 253 Euro, which means that the Twin Frozr IV cooler as well as the factory overclocking make MSI charge you an additional 10 Euro, which, in our opionion, a fair offer, especially since the Twin Frozr IV is a really capable cooler. Apart from that, we would have loved to see a bit lower power consumption, but still, if you are looking for a solid gaming graphics card, then you will do nothing wrong with the MSI Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition.   - Gaming
- Modding
 
 
We gave the Twin Frozr R9 280X OC Edition from MSI 4 out of 5 stars.
 







Page 1 - Presentation / Specifications
Page 2 - The card
Page 3 - Photo Gallery / Delivery
Page 4 - In-Game Performance
Page 5 - Temperatures / Noise levels
Page 6 - Performance/Price & Performance/Watt
Page 7 - Conclusion






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