Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Toxic Video Card Review

Final Thoughts
As we bring our review of the Sapphire Radeon R9 280X to a close I have to say this is one of the sexiest and most solid cards I have reviewed in quite a while. Not only does it look great, but it performs just the same. The R9 280X Toxic is currently the fastest R9 280X available! Out of the box it has factory overclocked speeds of 1100 MHz on the core with a 1150 MHz boost and the memory is at 6.4 GHz (effective). That gives you some great performance numbers as we noticed in our testing, especially over a reference R9 280X.

Sapphire has loaded this card with high quality custom components like double sided black diamond chokes and solid capacitors. These not only allow for the card to be stable at the high overclock they will also extend the lifetime of the card. With the high overclock you are going to want to keep the card nice and cool and Sapphire’s Tri-X cooler does a great job at it and has one of the largest heatpipes that we have ever seen on a video card. I wouldn’t say it is the most quiet cooler we have seen on a video card, but it does get the job done. On top of that Sapphire has outfitted this card with a pretty sexy backplate.

In our tests the R9 280X Toxic outperformed an overclocked GTX 770, which means its performance is pretty close to a GTX 780. That is pretty impressive considering that this card is selling for $349.99 and the MSI GTX 770 Gaming is $399 and a stock GTX 780 is $649. It will be very interesting to see how AMD’s upcoming R9 290 series compares to these other cards.

I also did not want to forget about the 10 phase power design and the cool light up Sapphire logo on the side of the card. This will add some extra bling to your case if you have a window.

When it comes down to it this is the best R9 280X available and if that what you want then this is the card for you. Overall ThinkComputers gives the Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Toxic a 9 out of 10 score and our Editor’s Choice Award!

rating9 10 small TC award editorschoice small

Pros:
– One sexy looking card
– 10 phase power design
– Quality components on the PCB
– Tri-X Cooler
– Highest R9 280X Factory overclock we have seen
– Great performance

Cons:
– The cooler can be quite loud under load

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