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 $50 less; though this won’t account for any factory overclocked GTX 770s that we’ve seen are out there.
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xTRICKYxx - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Wow, those are some crazy high power draw numbers on Furmark!nathanddrews - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
It's a good thing I never play Furmark!prasanth - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
I laughed way more than I should have at that..Da W - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
With that amount of power draw i don't see the point of not buying a 290X instead.Conduit - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Because enthusiast class GPU's are so cheap........ShieTar - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
The 290X will cost twice as much. That would be considered a point by some people.Conduit - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Great card. Honestly I don't see why anybody would pay 300$ more for a GTX 780. The performance advantage of the 780 over this card is clearly not 300$.colonelclaw - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
I concur. Let's hope Nvidia also agree with you and drop the price of the 780 by a significant number.GBHans - Sunday, October 13, 2013 - link
I agree. And considering these have 3gb of VRAM, not only do they disrupt the 780 price/performance, they clearly embarrass the $50 more 2gb 770's.nathanddrews - Thursday, October 10, 2013 - link
Given that an OC 780 can rub elbows with Titan, it's clear that the 780 should cost more... but more than DOUBLE the price of 280X? It's seriously laughable. Then again, I'm not the target market for $600+ GPUs.