GIGABYTE GV-R928XOC-3GD (rev. 1.0) Pro Reviews

Gigabyte’s R9 280X OC WindForce is a great choice for gaming at 1920x1080, but depending on the game you can even hit 2560x1600 at acceptable frame rates. It’s currently available for about €250 which is great value, since there’s practically no price premium for the overclocked GPU and non-reference cooler. The WindForce cooler isn’t the quietest out there, but then again it does a decent job but overclocking headroom is limited; we’ve seen much better. In any case, Gigabyte’s R9 280X OC WindForce is definitely a graphics card you should take a look at if you’re looking for good value.

AMD's new Radeon R9 280X Series is based on the AMD HD 7970 GHz design, so there is really nothing new overall, yet the card will definitely end up being a good choice for gamers because of its competitive price. Gigabyte's R9 280X WindForce OC comes overclocked out of the box. With a 100 MHz GPU overclock that translates into a 5% real-life performance improvement over the reference design, it is slightly (2%) faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 770. It would have been nice to at least see a small overclock on the memory chips, too, but Gigabyte chose not to do so. GPU overclocking works well and reaches levels typical for the Tahiti silicon. Overclocking the Elpida-made memory chips doesn't work so well, though, and ends up much lower than what we're used to seeing on typical Radeon HD 7970s or its GHz Edition variants. Using chips from SK Hynix or Samsung, they generally overclocked much better.