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This review today will feature comparisons against the fastest R280X card available today – the Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Edition. We also include results from a reference clocked GTX780, a GTX Titan and the class leading MSI GTX780 Lightning – all of which we have reviewed in the past.
All cards on test today have been tested using the latest Catalyst and Forceware drivers (13.11 beta6 and 331.65 respectively). The R9 290X is tested today in UBER mode (55% fan speed).
We are using one of our brand new test rigs supplied by PCSPECIALIST and built to our specifications. If you want to read more about this, or are interested in buying the same Kitguru Test Rig, check out our article with links on this page.
We are featuring results today with an Asus PQ321QE 4K screen running at 4K 3840 x 2160 resolution.
We will publish AMD R9 290 Crossfire results next week.
Room ambient was held at 23c throughout testing.
Comparison cards:
Nvidia GTX Titan (837mhz core / 1,502 mhz memory)
Nvidia GTX780 (863mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
MSI GTX780 Lightning (980mhz core / 1,502mhz memory)
Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Edition (1,150mhz core / 1,600mhz memory)
Software:
Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Unigine Valley Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
3DMark
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark
Games:
Sleeping Dogs
Total War: Rome 2
Dirt Showdown
Tomb Raider
Metro Last Light
GRID 2
Splinter Cell Blacklist
Batman Arkham Origins
All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.
You seem to have put dBa rating on power consumption by mistake 😛
Awesome, thanks – very very interesting!
Just an amazing card, can’t wait for the custom coolers + OC editions
Impressive performance, I can’t even get that at 1080p with my system :p
I want a 4K monitor badly, but I can only stretch to £2,000 savings. waiting patiently for this one to drop next year. fingers crossed!
Nice review, very interesting to see how things go in the future. I prefer gaming on consoles recently, but PC’s are miles ahead, lets be honest about it.
£3k for a monitor? holy crap on a stick. awesome though to drool over. I think this makes more sense long term for people as using three monitors needs such a massive desk it isn’t practical. a single monitor with super high resolution is the way forward.
Do you find some of the textures on older games look really nasty though? I bet only the latest games with tight afflliation with AMD or NVIDIA look great. Which reminds me, I need to get that batman game soon!
Did you really put 6 expensive pieces of hardware on your carpet? ..for photo purposes?
That’s fairly outrageous. Your negligence puts me at a loss for words.
@ jjj – the cards with the slot directly on the ground are actually resting on a small clear plastic sheet. The other cards are side ways on the floor, and as you might imagine the plastic coolers won’t self destruct if they touch a carpet. We appreciate your concern, but we weren’t going to bill you, don’t panic.
I was actually looking for a review on this and its just what Ineed
Amazing to see such a useful article and some idiot complaining about negligence (probably owns a HD7770 and has some serious jealousy issues!), Shame his loss for words didnt translate into his hands moving away from the keyboard.
Good review, got a lot of useful info from the results. GTX Titan is very good at this res, im sure the 6GB of memory helps in some games too.
Lovely indeed, want that monitor for sure!
well that was a great read, thanks. Wish I could afford the 290X, any news on the 290 pricing or release date yet? please?
Wow, even the 280x outperforms the GTX780 in many of the tests. It’s still early days for 4K gaming though, but definitely something I look forward to.
all the benchmarks i’ve seen so far Nvidia outperform Amd in low resolution, but as resolution increases beyond 1920×1080 ,AMD GCN outperforms Nvidia , even R7-280x pulls close to gtx 780 ,so $300 amd card matching $650 Nvidia card, wow.seems like AMD GCN is why superior to NVIDIA kepler.
just a 7970 GHz edition card notting more!
I did not take jjj comment too seriously. Provided me with a nice dose of laughter.
I’m not 100% on this but I’m pretty sure these aren’t the first AMD cards to offer crossfire without bridges… The bridges are almost an achilles’ heel anyways.