MSI R9 280X Twin Frozr Gaming Pro Reviews

Hitting at $299.99 at the time of writing, the MSI R9 280X 2GB Twin Frozr Gaming OC comes in at a really strong price point, sitting in line with the cheapest R9 280X offerings. The setup we're looking at today comes in at twice that price bringing us up to $600. Considering the GTX 780 3GB starts at $649.99 and the performance of this setup here today is stronger than the GTX 780 3GB in almost every situation, we see some good value from this setup. With the aggressive pricing of the new R9 series and the generally strong performance we see from multi-card setups these days, you can see that this CrossFire setup really has value. At the same time we completely understand that going down the path of multi video cards isn't for everyone. For the most part we would also like to say that CrossFire isn't perfect, but you can see today the only game that caused issues in the past was Nexuiz and we can see today that this isn't a problem with some great performance gains being seen. Moving away from the actual performance numbers, though, and looking at the performance of the MSI cooler, you can see it's strong. The Twin Frozr IV cooler has always been strong and you can see here today that while the hottest core is a little warmer at 73c, the noise levels of the card are impressive. Considering the performance of the setup here today, the fact that we're able to have such low noise levels is fantastic.

The new MSI Radeon R9-280X is a powerful, capable and affordable card ready to take gamers to the next level and beyond.

AMD's new Radeon R9 280X Series is based on the AMD HD 7970 GHz design, but probably comes with slightly reduced clocks to keep power draw at "saner" levels. 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. In our testing, we found the MSI R9 280X GAMING, which is overclocked out of the box, to be edging past the HD 7970 GHz, achieving a slim 3% performance advantage. AMD's latest 13.11 Beta drivers include new performance optimizations for games, though, which helps in these results. Given the good memory chips used, it would have been nice to see an overclock on the memory too—our manual overclocking confirms that such would have easily been possible. MSI's new cooler doesn't seem to be such a great implementation for this card. While it only runs pretty hot under gaming, reaching up to 87°C, which is no problem by itself, we also see very high VRM temperatures, well above 115°C. This suggests that the cooler does not properly cool the voltage regulation circuitry despite having a baseplate that should do so. Its lack of proper VRM cooling caused the card to throttle in many of our non-gaming stress tests, though gaming performance seems unaffected.

The MSI Radeon R9 280X OC Edition is a faster, smarter, cheaper Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, and it's much faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 760.