AMD Radeon R9 280X Video Card Roundup

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When the AMD Radeon HD 7970 was introduced in 2011 it cost $549 and made short work of NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 video card. The AMD Radeon HD 7970 used the Tahiti GPU that has 2,048 stream processors built on the TSMC's 28nm process technology with 3GB of GDDR5 memory on a 384-bit bus. If someone would have told us back in 2011 that this video card would be re-branded and still being sold in 2014 we would have laughed, but here we are nearly two years later and that is exactly what happened. The AMD Radeon 200 series will be headed up by the Radeon R9 290X, but that flagship card has not been released just yet. The second fastest card is the AMD Radeon R9 280X and that is the re-branded Radeon HD 7970! Our friends at ASUS, MSI and XFX sent us retail cards for us to take a look at. Each of the cards are running at various clock speeds, so it should give us all a pretty good idea of what we can expect from the AMD R9 280X lineup. legitreviews.com