HIS Radeon R9-280X IceQ X2 Turbo review

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Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

I really do like the IceQ X2 Turbo edition that HIS offers here today. Now, if HIS can price it just right in the 275 EUR bracket, then for a fair amount of money you can haul in quite a lot of value for money performance wise. The card is lengthy though, be sure to check out that it'll fit inside your chassis with its close to 30cm thus roughly 12 Inches length. Stability and performance wise you'll never have anything to complain about and when you opt an IceQ model, noise never is an issue either. That makes their graphics card above average and well respected. But let's talk about the regulars. Now honestly, this really is the Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition (the one that can boost the clock frequency). With a few tweaks we see it perform slightly faster then that Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition. No blame or pointing fingers here though, NVIDIA refreshed its product as well so both parties did this. Overall it remains a very pleasing card to work with. But the sheer reality is that this is a Tahiti XT2/XTL GPU plastered on the a PCB with another cooler and a different label on the box. You'll maybe able to see 5 to 10% performance differences but overall that's it. The pricing however is interesting alright. Hey I'm just stating facts here.
 

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See, fact remains though that the AMD R9-280X is a very capable card with its 3GB graphics memory partition. You can play games easily at FullHD and have a sure thing at QHD 2560x1440; as such the card remains to be in a sweet-spot. The pricing will remain fairly equal towards the R7970 GHz. 

Overall

When you look at the Radeon R9-280X overall, performance, some new Eyefinity features, PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all other stuff then we can only conclude that we like these cards belong in the high-end (not enthusiast) graphics card arena. For those that embrace multi-monitor gaming, it's for you guys that AMD decided to go for that massive 3GB framebuffer / graphics memory. This product is cooling fairly well, expect roughly 60 Degrees C under heavy GPU load in a proper ventilated PC.

Noise levels

Directly related to the cooling are the noise levels. With one card installed you are absolutely fine. In both idle and under stress you simply can hardly hear this card. In that respect the dual-fan IceQ X² cooler is performing just really well, and that's music to my ears (okay lame pun) ! Performance wise you have nothing to complain about either, the idle levels hover in the low 30 Degrees C and stressed we barely got the GPU over 60 Degrees C. That is as good as it's going to get with a GPU of this class really.

Power Consumption 

The board is rated with a fairly high 250 Watt TDP, that means when you completely stress it, that's the power consumption. Our measurements showed the board TDP is roughly 245 Watt, its reasonable for this kind of performance especially when you take into account that the product is factory overclocked for you. Just as impressive is the board's IDLE power state, in desktop mode when not in use it can throttle down and disable huge segments of the GPU allowing it to draw 10 Watt only. Once your monitor jumps into energy saving / sleep mode then the power draw drops towards 2.7 Watt. Since you do not game all day ling, that's where the most power saving can be found.

Overclocking

Overclocking then, we see average results thus far on ALL brands we tested, we could set the card at 1150 MHz and with a bit of additional voltage tweaking 1200 MHz becomes possible. After that stability caves in pretty fast though. Despite many regulation from NVIDIA, AMD is leaving the voltage bandwidth threshold much wider. Up-to 1.3 Volts, and that really is enough for a nice air-cooled overclock experience. I'll say this once, NVIDIA took away the fun from proper overclocking, AMD still is allowing a lot of stuff. Though slowly they are getting on the same path with power, load and voltage limiters. So with voltage tweaking and some more time 1200 MHz can be achieved (that number varies a little per batch of course). A little disappointing but overall tweaking this card should get you anywhere from 5 to 15% additional performance out of the card.

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Final Words

Yeah, I really like what HIS has done with the HIS Radeon R9-280X IceQ X² Boost graphics card. Anyone with a monitor up-to 1920x1080/1200 will get  'very nice' performance with the latest games available whilst applying harsh image quality settings as well and at 2560x1440 you are still good to go. If you can spot this product for say sub 300 EUR then we feel it's a really nice deal that we can recommend very much. 

The HIS Radeon HDR9-280X IceQ X² Boost Clock is a little big in size though, but the cooling performance is great, the noise levels very low, in fact silent, it comes clocked at 1050 MHz on the core, has 3GB of graphics memory, what's not to like we ask you ?  For say 299 USD it is an attractive product with 3GB of graphics memory. And hey, did you know that the R7970 launched in December 2011 that it was tagged at an MSRP of roughly 500 USD. Any game will play 1080P perfectly with the best image quality settings. Even 2560x1440 should not be a big deal. That said, the reality is that anybody who bought their Radeon HD 7970 back in December 2011, there really is no reason to upgrade just yet. Aside from cooler size added benefits are the factory overclock, the four outputs and overall just a really nice product that will guarantee you a pleasant gaming experience as these cards have plenty of performance to work with. It is hard to not like this product and as such it comes definitely recommended.

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