The R9 280X was seriously impressive in our tests. The R9 280X has one dual-link and one single-link DVI port, HDMI and twin Mini DisplayPort sockets, so you may need a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adaptor (around £10 from to plug into your DisplayPort monitor. The card needs both six-pin and eight-pin PCI Express power connectors, so you'll need a decent power supply. The XFX Radeon R9 280X is a very big card at 295mm long it's only slightly shorter than the huge Sapphire R9 290X, so measure your case carefully. Sapphire VAPOR-X R9 290X 4GB GDDR5 TRI-X OC XFX AMD Radeon R9 290 Black Double Dissipation Edition Sapphire R9 285 2GB GDDR5 ITX Compact Edition XFX Radeon R9 280X Double Dissipation Black Edition This has a huge 2,816 GPU cores running at 1,080MHz, and is a rival for the top-end Nvidia GTX 970 cards. Finally, there's the most powerful card we've tested: the R9 290X. You get 2,560 GPU cores, 4GB of GDDR5 memory and a 947MHz core clock speed. The R9 290 is significantly more expensive than the R9 285, but is a big step up in terms of specification. The R9 285 cards we've tested all have 2GB of GDDR5 RAM, compared to the 3GB in the mid-range R9 280, and have the same 1,792 GPU cores.
According to Wikipedia, this brings "improved tessellation performance, lossless delta colour compression in order to reduce memory bandwidth usage, an updated and more efficient instruction set".
Amd radeon r9 290x pro#
The Radeon R9 285 cards are based on AMD's newest Tonga PRO GPUs, and are the first cards to support AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) 1.2 architecture. The Tahiti XTL and XT2 chips both have the same number of GPU cores and the same clock speeds, but the XT2 variant apparently has some power efficiency improvements. This has a Tahiti XTL or XT2 core, depending on the manufacturer, with 2,048 GPU cores and stock 850MHz core and 1,000MHz boost speeds.
We've tested four AMD chipsets for gaming enthusiasts.