Radeon R9 280X 

I would say the R9 280X offers excellent performance at 1080p, since you can still max out the details settings, including anti-aliasing.

It is also nice to see a memory clock on the card—it provides a quick and easy performance advantage many other board partners overlook.

So it looks like AMD's R9 280X is the best price/performance option in this segment right now, and that by quite a large margin.

It supports software control and monitoring via I2C, but due to it being rather rare, OC software might not support it as well as other controllers.

We are seeing amazing noise results that are whisper quiet in idle and only slightly more audible during gaming because of MSI's excellent TwinFrozr cooler and proper fan speed settings in the BIOS.

We've seen MSI's GAMING cooler design a few times before, on cards using NVIDIA GPUs.

Given the good memory chips used, it would have been nice to see an overclock on the memory too—our manual overclocking confirms that such would have easily been possible.

With a 100 MHz GPU overclock that translates into a 5% real-life performance improvement over the reference design, it is slightly (2%) faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 770.

Using chips from SK Hynix or Samsung, they generally overclocked much better.

At first glance, the card looks very similar to the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3 GB, but only the cooler assembly is unchanged.

While the card is very quiet in idle, we couldn't get the fans to spin up to the same levels under load as we did in-game.

Clocks and voltages in non-gaming states are normal, so the BIOS settings are ok.

No surprises here: GPU and memory clocks reach the levels typical for the Tahiti GPU with Hynix GDDR5 memory.

With the primary heatsink removed, you can see two secondary heatplates that sit on the voltage regulation circuitry and cool most of the memory chips.

GPU and memory clocks reach the levels typical for the Tahiti GPU with Hynix GDDR5 memory—no surprises there.