MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G - A Decent Choice

MSI's First AMD Gaming Card - MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G

Following last week's AMD R9 280X launch and our analysis of the first card based off the ASUS DirectCU II TOP edition, we take MSI's R9 280X graphics card for a spin. The MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G card is the first AMD-based product from the company’s Gaming series. We were hoping to see the R9 290X debut in this series, but since that's not yet official at the point of publication, we had to settle for seconds, with the R9 280X GPU.

To recap about the R9 280X - it's basically a Radeon HD 7970 (Tahiti core) derivative and it performs very much like a Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition as we found out while testing the ASUS card. So the Radeon R9 280X is more of a re-branding effort than anything else to get in line with the new gaming and API development initiatives along with the new R9 290 series that will feature a new GPU core. One thing that AMD wanted to stress is that the new R9 series will have the ability to run 3x DVI/HDMI connections simultaneously (the older Radeon HD 7000 series could only support any two of them). As such, there are hardware-level differences, but not much from the GPU core perspective. For AMD fans, the new GPU series brings some excitement to the gaming scene, but unfortunately, not a lot in terms of big and immediate changes (minus the possibility of older Radeon HD 7000 series to go for a discounted price).

According to MSI, the R9 280X card features a 6+1+1 power system; with 6-phase going to the R9 280X GPU core, 1-phase for the 3GB GDDR5 video memory modules, and one for the phase-locked loop (PLL) of the card’s board. The GPU core comes with a slight overclocked headroom of only 50MHz, rated at 1050MHz. Out of the box, the card is actually running 1020MHz (called the Gaming mode), but using the provided utility, you can quickly notch it up to 1050MHz (although this is still lower than the ASUS TOP edition running at 1070MHz). Memory is however not overclocked and rated at the default speed of 6000MHz.

The card’s fan shroud sports the now familiar color scheme of the series; with its red and black hues splashed on. The fan shroud is a part of the card's Twin Frozr IV cooling system that features dual 100mm fans and five copper heatpipes in direct contact with the GPU.

The card features Military Class IV components in order to ensure the stability of the card’s operation during intense gaming or overclocking. These components are also used in the MSI N780 Lightning and the MSI GeForce GTX 780 Twin Frozr Gaming 3GB GDDR5 OC graphic card. In addition, the PCB of the card features a metal plate that should offer some passive cooling to the PCB's components as well as prevent the board from flexing.

Unlike the new R9 reference cards that have dual dual-link DVI ports, a HDMI and a DisplayPort, the video connectivity options of the MSI card consists of two mini-DisplayPort ports, a HDMI port, and one dual-link DVI-I port (which is exactly the same as the old Radeon HD 7900 series).

In term of software utilities, besides MSI's Afterburner tool, the card also comes bundled with the Gaming App tuning utility which enables gamers to toggle between high-performance OC, Gaming, and Silent modes. By toggling these modes, the application modifies the GPU clock to either 1050MHz, 1020MHz or 1000MHz respectively.

Test Setup

These are the specifications of our graphics testbed:

• Intel Core i7-3960X (3.3GHz)
• ASUS P9X79 Pro (Intel X79 chipset) Motherboard
• 4 x 2GB DDR3-1600 G.Skill Ripjaws Memory
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive (OS)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 7200 RPM 1TB SATA hard drive (Benchmarks + Games)
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit

Below is the list of cards we'll be testing. The immediate competitor to the MSI Gaming card is the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP card. In addition, a number of add-on partner cards were used to represent reference ones, and they were downclocked to the clock speeds of their reference counterparts in order to gauge their performance with updated drivers. For the AMD Radeon HD 7970, the downclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 OC 3GB GDDR5 was used. For the NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards, the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 Windforce 3X OC was downclocked to represent a reference GTX 770; while the MSI GeForce GTX 760 Twin Frozr IV OC was used to represent the GTX 760.

• MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11)
• ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.11)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.40 Beta)
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 2GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 331.40 Beta)
• AMD Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition 3GB GDDR5 (AMD Catalyst 13.9)

Note 1: In temperature and power consumption comparisons, the results used were from the data gathered from the actual reference cards. Please refer to our reviews for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 and GTX 760.

Benchmarks

Since we've already figured out the potential of the Radeon R9 280X via the previously reviewed ASUS card, we'll be using a much more truncated list of tests this time round for our assessment:-

• Futuremark 3DMark 2013
• Crysis 3

Primarily, we will be focusing on the overclocking upside, temperature performance and power consumption of the MSI R9 280X Gaming. This is in order to determine how MSI is able to differentiate its first R9 280X graphics card in comparison with the ASUS R9 R280X card. For our temperature and power consumption tests, 3DMark 2011 was used. 

Here's a look at how the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G stacks up against the competing cards:

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3DMark (2013) Results

We started off with the usual benchmarks of the 3DMark (2013); the first round was Fire Strike, with extreme levels of tessellation and volumetric illumination, as well as complex smoke simulation using compute shaders and dynamic particle illumination. For the second round, the more gruelling tests of Fire Strike Extreme, with more tessellation, more particle effects and more taxing DirectCompute calculations, will tax the cards more.

The MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G is the clear runner-up in this round, when the card is pitted against the ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II TOP 3GB GDDR5. To give due credit to the card, it was trailing behind the ASUS R9 280X card, which was the leader of the pack in this test, by thin margins in the range of 1- 1.4%. This is mainly due to the MSI card's slightly more conservative clock speeds for both its GPU and graphics memory. To recap, the MSI was in its OC Mode, with its GPU core rated at 1050MHz; while the ASUS card's core was rated at 1070MHz. In addition, the memory module of the ASUS card was overclocked to 6400MHz but the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G had video memory rated at the default 6000MHz.

The MSI card pulled ahead of our reference AMD Radeon HD 7970 by approximately 3.6%. Against the strongest fielded NVIDIA card, the GTX 770, the MSI card was ahead by a margin in the range of 6.6- 7.2%. The MSI card was about 36% better than the reference GTX 760 in this test.

Crysis 3 Results

We put the cards through the Crysis 3 game title, to determine how well they handle the game's CryEngine 3, with extreme amounts of tessellation, per-pixel per-object motion blur, Bokeh Depth of Field, displacement mapping on small terrain, particle and volumetric lighting and fog shadows, dynamic cloth and vegetation, dynamic caustics and diffuse shadows.

The NVIDIA GTX 700 series cards managed to pull ahead in this test, with the GTX 770 turning in the best performance. Among the AMD cards, with anti-aliasing turned on, the ASUS card was the best performer; however, even with AA turned off, the cards failed to churn out average frame rates above 30fps, at the resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels.

Overclocking Results

The MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G turned in an impressive performance during our overclocking exercise. This can be greatly attributed to the Military Class IV components used in its power delivery system. We managed to overclocked its GPU core to 1225MHz, up from its factory overclocked rate of 1050MHz. But we failed to achieve an impressive overclocked headroom for its memory module as they maxed out 6800MHz as we noticed some visual degradation in the 3DMark benchmark. Despite this shortfall, the MSI card managed to outperform the ASUS R9 280X DirectCU II TOP card by a narrow margin in the range of 1.5- 2.3%. As a note to our readers, the temperature of the MSI card's GPU core hovered at around 60 degrees Celsius during our overclocking exercise.

Temperature Results

Using the 3DMark 2011 benchmark for our temperature and power tests when running the MSI card at stock speeds, we found the Twin Frozr IV cooling system proved very effective and kept the MSI card's temperature of about 62 degrees Celsius. This is about as good as the ASUS DirectCU II TOP edition whose cooler managed a 64 degrees Celsius but with a speedier default GPU clock.

Power Consumption Results

The MSI R9 280X card's idle power draw is only slightly higher than the ASUS card. But under load, the card's power consumption was lower by 9.4% than the ASUS card, at 347W. In comparison with the rest of the cards, the MSI R9 280X Gaming 3G card's power draw was the lowest, and registered a good difference between itself and the reference Radeon HD 7970 GHz edition too.

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.

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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