Radeon R9 280X 

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

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.

G HL225DBB 21.5" 1920x1080 Benchmark scores in other reviews are only comparable when this exact same configuration is used.

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

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

As a result, in many of our non-gaming stress tests, the card did end up throttling; game performance seems unaffected, though.

While it just runs pretty hot under gaming, reaching up to 87°C, which is no problem by itself, we've also seen very high VRM temperatures, well above 115°C. This suggests that the cooler does not properly cool the voltage regulation circuitry, despite having a baseplate that should do so.

Final pricing for the MSI R9 280X GAMING is not available yet, but given the reference design price of $300, we expect the card to retail around $310.

MSI has installed a dual-BIOS feature on the R9 280X GAMING, a feature that we've seen on many HD 7900 Series cards before.

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

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

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

Memory is merely clocked at the default 1500 MHz, though.