HIS Radeon R9-280 IceQ X2 OC review
Now before we begin with the new graphics cards the first thing that you guys will need to get used to is the new naming scheme. AMD ended with the Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series graphics card in 2013. Logic dictates that AMD would have continued with a series 9000. But hey now, we already have had the Radeon 9000 series many years ago (2003), oh and who doesn’t remember the Radeon 9800 Pro right? As such it was time to bring in a new naming scheme, a bit more in line with AMD’s APUs. R9 will be high-end and R7 will be mainstream and inevitably R5 being entry level. After that you’ll notice products being tagged as 250, 260X, 270X, 280, 280X and the coolest of them all the Radeon R9 290, R290X and 295×2. Though almost all of these are all new model graphics cards, most of them are respin products based on the Radeon HD 7000 series with a number of improvements. The respin products will get a new PCB, cooling, clock frequencies and much like NVIDIA boost, power, voltage, fan and load limiters. In the long run there are three products in the lineup that come with a new GPU. For example The R7 260X and then of course R9 290 / 290X will be Hawaii GPU based. The cards with new silicon come with a truckload of new features like integrated DSPs offering TrueAudio technology. The rest (270X/280/280X) will keep the older specs. I agree that is a little confusing, but we’ll explain it all over the next pages.