Gigabyte Radeon R9 280x Mining (do not buy)

 

Introduction

 

Mining with the Gigabyte Radeon R9 280x has proved to be a good performer but with too many downside that will ruin your mining experience. The card has proven to be a very stable card with the rig setup with 2 of them rarely crashing. The extra 256 stream processors (2048) should give a leading edge over the older HD 7950 and the newer R9 280(non x) but fails to deliver the leading edge with hash per watt, with the HD 7950 pulling  an average of 3.25 Kh/watt at 650 to 700 Kk/s and the R9 280x delivering 2.45 Kh/watt at 675 to 750 Kh/s.

 

Temperature and Power Consumption

The Gigabyte card is fitted with their signature Windforce cooler that features dense aluminium fins, 3x75mm fans and 6 copper heat pipes to keep this beast of a card cool. The fans are designed to be silent but will spin up to 4000 rpm at 100% while keeping quieter and cooler than most other coolers such as the reference blower cooler. The out of the box fan profile will keep this card silent but will try to ramp the temps up before the fan will start to speed up, it will try to pin it at about 85 degrees which is too hot for a 24/7 operation. I recommend and use an open air rig that is able to feed the card a constant supply of cool air. At 80% fan speed expect the temps to be around 76 degrees with little change if you ramp the speeds up. In a case expect to see temps of 80 degrees at 90-100% fan speed.

 

The power from the wall when the card is at full load is about ~360 watts with that number varying from card to card. The card from Gigabyte was 360 watts and my card from Sapphire requiring an extra 15 watts to power.

 

Undervolting (rant)

The Gigabyte Radeon R9 280x is a voltage locked card by default in the bios with a flash required to bring it down from its high 1.2 volt lock. Some cards do not flash too well with them requiring multiple flashes to bring it down. This is a hassle that I should not have to go through to simply lower the voltage of the card, if you are looking to undervolt your card I would suggest you going with the MSI, ASUS or Sapphire variant.

 

Mining

Mining on the R9 280x was an easy experience with the rig only crashing once. The cg miner settings are as follows:

Thread Concurrency: 8192

Worksize: 256

Vectors: 1

Intensity: 13

Threads: 2

 

After setting up the cgminer I decided to clock the card at a core of 1000MHz and the memory  at 6000MHz due to the high memory usage of scrypt and low core usage. The average hash for this card on the forums is reported to are around 720 Kh/s but mine was under hashing at 680 Kh/s when at stock voltages and produced 650 Kh/s when undervolted.

 

Gigabyte Radeon R9 280x OC Review

Introduction

Radeon R9 280x

The Radeon R9 280x is a familiar card in the new 2013 AMD lineup. This graphics card will spark a familiar hello to anyone who has had any experience with the older Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, as it features the same Tahiti processor. The number of stream processors remain the same at 2048 and the same can be said for the number of texture units and ROPs. The clock speeds are slightly lower on the reference card only clocking in at a stock clock of 950MHz which is 50MHz less than the 7970 GHZ Edition, but is still 25MHz faster than the base 7970. What really separates this new card from the older 7970 and the 7970 GHz Eition card the the price. The MSRP for this card is $299 which is $200 less than the $499 MSRP of the 7970 GHz card and $100 less than the $399 it cost for the 7970. One thing to note is that due to being on the old architecture True Audio Technology will not be supported unlike the R7 260x and the R9 290(x). However there is support for the Mantle api which is in the AMD Catalyst beta driver 14.2.

Gigabyte Radeon R9 280x OC

When Gigabyte gets their hands on a new graphics they make sure that it performs above and beyond the stock clocks. What they delivered was a factory overclocked performer which is able to play almost any game at high texture qualities at 1080p. The core clock has been taken from the reference 950MHz and been overclocked to 1100MHz. The 3GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 6000MHz which will allow for good performance when running multi monitor setups or running games with high resolution textures.

To combat the high temperatures produced by the Tahiti core Gigabyte has fitted their flagship windforce cooler. This particular model of the windforce cooler has the 3 75mm fans blowing down onto 6 full copper heat pipes and onto aluminium fins. This current generation also features the “triangle cool” which features a triangular slab of aluminium which is used to push air away from the PCB allowing for greater cooling capacity. The windforce cooler defiantly reduces the noise and temperatures that we have been used to seeing on the reference blower design.

The graphics card comes with Gigabyte OC Guru 2 which is Gigabytes overclocking utility. It is more aesthetically pleasing than other tools such as MSI Afterburner but lacks the complex monitoring that it the MSI software allows. I was able to get a stable overclock of 1150MHz on the core and a memory clock of 6400MHz. One big complaint that I have to make with this card is that the voltage is locked at 1.2 volts in the bios. This leaves little room to find the maximum potential of this card by limiting the maximum overclock which will lead to the computer crashing, or in mining cases won’t allow you to under volt. This defeats the purpose of the windforce cooler which is pretty unfortunate. If you are looking to overclock or undervolt it is recommended that you get the Asus, Sapphire or MSI version of this card.

Gaming & Benchmarks

Test bench:

CPU: AMD FX 8350 Overclock 4.8GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i

Motherboard: MSI 990FXA-GD80

RAM: 16GB Kingstion Hyper X blue 2133MHz

OS: Windows 7 Professional 64 bit

Driver: AMD Catalyst 14.2

API: Direct X 11

3DMark 11

3DMark is a synthetic benchmarking tool designed by Futuremark  to test the limits of a GPU in a synthetic environment. It is able to test almost any card in any setup using Direct X 11. In the graph shown here is the scores from the first test. From what people have seen, 3DMark is not always an accurate representation of the graphics card true performance.

Unigine Heaven 4.0

Unigine Heaven like 3DMark is a synthetic benchmark but is more accurate. This is a free tool to download from the website that allows the user to benchmark their system in varying ways including multi monitor setups (AMD eyefinity only) and using different APIs such as Direct X 11, Direct X 9 and open gl. The world in the Heaven benchmark is incredibly detailed with all models consisting of high polygon count, high texture resolutions and extensive use of tessellation. The lighting effects include advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) which will change as it is a dynamic simulation. This benchmark is enough to bring any 780 ti or R9 290x rig to it’s knees.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider is a very GPU intensive game due to the level of detailno in the Tress FX features used in the game. It is used to model animations such as hair, it is easily the most frame rate draining feature in the game and you will easily see a drop in frame rates with a lager drop on NVidia cards due to it using direct compute. When you add that with the high resolution textures expect a low frame rate and high GDDR5 memory usage.

Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite was one of the best games of 2013, with its stunning graphics and beautiful lighting makes requires you to have a good graphics card. The game is built using Unreal Engine 3 and uses medium high density polygon models and textures that are uncommon to be reused too often. Bioshock uses the Direct X 11 API which can sometimes bottleneck low end CPUs.

Battlefield 4

Battlefield 4 was one of the most anticipated games of 2013. Being designed by Dice (EA) on the custom and new Frostbite 3 engine with allowed the developer to program AMD’s Mantle API into the game. With recent optimization to the net code and to the hardware the frame rates are becoming more consistand and they are rising. In the graph below we can see that the Mantle API has added 4 FPS  with may not be too much but considering it is a simple software update it is worth it.

 Call of Duty Ghosts (warning anger and cynical thoughts)

Call of Duty Ghosts is the newest addition to the yearly release to the yearly franchise. The game is built in the IW6 engine which is an updated version of the engine that was used to design MW3 and Black Ops and MW2 and World at War and MW1 and COD 2 (WTF INFINITY WARD!). This game launched with bad optimization for its PC port with frame rate drops, tearing, constant micro stutter and missing textures. Optimization however has gotten better for PC gamers over the last few months. The textures are pulled from the old games with the old textures being stretched over high resolution STL files resulting in a horrible, low graphical experience. The addition of a FOV slider is a step in the right direction but it only goes up to 80 (WTF INFINITY WARD AGAIN!!!!!).