The Sapphire Radeon R9 280 Dual-X card uses established, well-grounded cooling on a capable card, though it seems profligate not to increase frequencies much above stock speeds.
AMD's partners have relied on a succession of price cuts and tweaks to long-standing GPU architectures for their premium graphics offerings in 2014. This is no bad thing if the cards are priced appropriately and continue to offer meaningful competition to rival GeForces.
Such an approach has been taken with the Radeon HD R9 280 GPU released earlier this month. A rebadged HD 7950 Boost in all but name, a new-and-improved £199 price tag brings it into the financial reach of more users. GPU hardware development pace will continue to slow as transitions to smaller processes become more expensive, so, moving forwards, we'll likely see more teasing out of present architectures.
The Sapphire Radeon R9 280 Dual-X card uses established, well-grounded cooling on a capable card, though it seems profligate not to increase frequencies much above stock speeds - overclocking tests show it to be a capable performer.
Pricing is always key in this segment of the market. Increasing the budget by £30 brings the R9 280X and GTX 770 OC very much into play - you'll be rewarded with extra performance, sometimes considerably higher, from those rival cards. But judged solely at the intended price point, Sapphire's custom-cooled card makes reasonable sense, particularly if your monitor is limited to a 1080p resolution.
The Good
Great cooling capacity
Solid performance at £200
Overclocks well
The Sapphire Radeon R9 280 Dual-X is available to purchase from Overclockers.co.uk.
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