Product Listing

MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G - A Decent Choice

By Wong Chung Wee - 14 Oct 2013
Launch SRP: S$479

Conclusion

Conclusion

The performance of the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G card is fairly decent, given its slight default factory overclock levels. The company has attempted to distinguish the card by branding the card under its Gaming series, with its familiar red and black color scheme. On top of that, the card also features Military Class IV components that proved their worth during our overclocking exercise. The overclocked MSI card turned in the best performance; however, we were unable to overclock its memory modules higher than 6800MHz. There are also little details that the company has included like the card's dual BIOS system. This allows the user to tweak the card on one set of BIOS; while the other acts as a backup or allows for normal operations of the card. MSI has even bundled a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter so that the user can connect devices using a regular DisplayPort cable.

The MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G card boasts of quality build components and an excellent cooling system. Like its ASUS counterpart, its decent gaming performance is probably more suited for mainstream gamers

In standard benchmarks, the card trailed slightly behind the ASUS card as the former has a slightly lower factory overclocked GPU; while its memory modules remained at default levels. In terms of cooling, the card's Twin Frozr IV system performed about as well as the ASUS counterpart by cooling the card to 62 degrees Celsius under load. When check power draw at load levels, it also drew notably less power than the ASUS card. And the last win over the ASUS card is its price tag of S$529 that is S$20 lower than ASUS. Despite the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G's conservative factory overclock of the R9 280X GPU core, we found it an overall better choice as it's a more efficient card, while having achieving better overclocking performance.

Our experiences with the two R9 280X cards tell us the R9 280X is suited for gamers who don't mind playing demanding gamers with certain visual features turned off. We had witnessed the failure of the cards to churn out average frame rates that are above 30fps during our Crysis 3 once we crank up the resolution beyond Full-HD and use anti-aliasing. In short, we can safely say that R9 280X-based cards are not be top-tier gaming cards, but are still plenty fast most non-demanding gamers or those who game at no more than 1920 x 1080 pixels resolution.

If you need better performance, currently this realm is still dominated by the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 and GTX Titan cards. But with AMD's impending release of the top-end R9 290X GPU, we may see some serious contenders from AMD very soon.

Update as of 16th October 2013, 8pm:-

We were told that MSI has revised the pricing of the card to S$479; this amounts to a discount of close to 10% off its initial launch price of S$529. This new price puts the card squarely between the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 and GTX 770 add-in partners’ cards. The average price of a GTX 760 card is slightly over S$400; while the GTX 770 retails for S$650 on average. This makes the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G card, an option for consideration by upgraders who initially considering a GTX 770. It's also well priced when compared with current Radoen HD 7970 products. As for system builders who were originally going to purchase a GTX 760 card, some may consider increasing their budgets for the MSI R9 280X-based card because for a mere 16 to 18% price increase (which amounts to just over S$50), users can expect sizable performance gains of about 20- to 35% on average.

With the card's new target price, the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G becomes an obvious choice for gamers looking to upgrade to an AMD R9 280X-based gaming system, capable of handling resolution beyond Full HD (if one is judicious with the in-game graphics quality options). As such, we have also revised the value rating of the card slightly from 8.0 to 8.5.

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8.5
  • Performance 8.5
  • Features 8.5
  • Value 8.5
The Good
Good cooling system
Rather attractive price point
Strong overclocking performance
The Bad
Conservative factory overclock; video memory not overclocked
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