AMD Radeon R7-260X R9-270X and R9-280X review - Introduction

Presenting the AMD Radeon R7-260X - R9-270X and R9-280X

Today we'll review the AMD Radeon R7-260X, R9-270X and R9-280X. So yeah welcome everyone, after many moons it's finally time for AMD to release the initial batch of their new product series. The new R7 and R9 graphics are finally here and in the upcoming weeks we're going to see many new products in the AMD Radeon line-up. Some really are respin products, and others are totally new. We'll brief you through it all though.

Now before we begin with the new graphics cards the first thing that you guys will need to get used to is the new naming schema. AMD ended with the Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series graphics cards in 2013. Logic dictates that AMD would have continued with a series 9000. But hey now, we already have had the Radeon 9000 series many years ago (2003), oh and who doesn't remember the Radeon 9800 Pro right?

As such it was time to bring in a new naming scheme, a bit more in line with AMD's APUs. R9 will be high-end and R7 will be mainstream and inevitably R5 being entry level. After that you'll notice products being tagged as 250, 260X, 270X, 280X and the coolest two of them all are the Radeon R9 290 and R290X (which have yet to be released).

This review will cover three products in total: the R7-260X, R9-270X and 280X lineup of graphics cards. And though these are all new model graphics cards, most of them are respin products based off the Radeon HD 7000 series with a number of improvements. The respin products will get a new PCB, cooling, clock frequencies and, much like NVIDIA, boost power, voltage, fan and load limiters. In the long run there are three products in the lineup that come with a new GPU. The R7 260X and then of course R9 290 / 290X will be Hawaii GPU based. The cards with new silicon come with a truckload of new features like integrated DSPs offering TrueAudio technology. The rest (270X/280X) will keep the older specs. I agree that is a little confusing, but we'll explain it all in the following pages.

Head over to the next page where we'll start-up the technology overview first, but not before you have seen at least one of the cards though.