14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, we said that the new range of graphics adapters from Advanced Micro Devices would sell from October 8 onwards. Sure enough, the newcomers are here for you to peruse and acquire.
Keep in mind that the Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 are not up for sale yet. Those will only come out on October 15, one week from now.
The top-end boards will also be restricted to AMD's reference design, unlike the ones that came out today, which have been customized extensively by AMD's various OEMs.
As some may have guessed by now, the Radeon R9 280X adapter is the best in the new collection. Based on the Radeon HD 7970, it has a base GPU clock of 850 MHz (1 GHz GPU Boost), and 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at 6 GHz clock.
The stream processor count is 2,048 (28 nm "Tahiti" silicon), and the board also has a 384-bit memory interface, 128 TMUs and 32 ROPs. The specs should vary from brand to brand though, and so will the price, although it should stick close to the $299 / €299 mark.
NVIDIA competitor, GeForce GTX 770, sells for $410/€410 right now. Maybe a price cut is coming, who knows.
The second card, Radeon R9 270X, has 1050 MHz GPU and 6.4 GHz memory clocks, but only 1,280 stream processors, 32 ROPs, 80 TMUs, and 2 GB GDDR5 on 256-bit interface. It sells for $199 / €199. A 28nm “Pitcairn” silicon acts as the heart.
As for the Radeon R7 260X, it is a board with a price of under $139 / €139, since it has 896 stream processors, 16 ROPs, 56 TMUs, 128-bit memory interface, 2 GB VRAM and clocks of 1100 MHz and 6.5 GHz for the GPU and memory, respectively. The codename of the graphics processing unit is “Bonaire.”
Ironically enough, AMD's product release comes on the heels of Origin PC's announcement that it is dropping AMD video board support. Never fear, though, since AMD has plenty of other partners amongst custom PC suppliers.
