The Sapphire R9 280X Toxic Review

Final Words

Bringing our review of Sapphire’s R9 280X Toxic to a close, our experience with the card and our results prove that Sapphire has fundamentally achieved what they have set out to do: they’ve put together the fastest R9 280X card. It’s 13% faster than a stock 280X and it’s still 5% faster than the factory overclocked Asus card we looked at earlier this week. Out of the box the Toxic even maintains a hair’s lead over the Asus card when the Asus card is overclocked, which means we’re looking at a card that’s arguably competitive at stock with end user overclocked cards.

With that said while this isn’t necessarily a head-to-head article between the 280X Toxic and the Asus 280X DirectCU II TOP, it’s a logical comparison we have to make given the fact that both are factory overclocked 280X cards shooting for strong out of the box performance. For gaming workloads the 280X Toxic cleanly and clearly beats the Asus card here by a meaningful performance amount. However Asus is absolutely a spoiler here due to their aggressive pricing and their very quiet cooler. Their 280X DCUII TOP can’t match the Toxic, but it’s $40 cheaper and over 5dB quieter. Consequently if all you want is the fastest 280X on the market then Sapphire’s 280X Toxic is clearly the card to get, otherwise the Asus card is worth a consideration for its better price/performance ratio and cooling performance. As is almost always the case for factory overclocked cards there is a price to pay for the very fastest card, both in literal cost and in power and acoustics.

Meanwhile we’ll also quickly point out that the 280X Toxic ends up being faster than a stock GTX 770 by several percent for $50 less. But that’s a tricky comparison at best since we’re now comparing different cooler types (blower versus open air), a significant difference in power consumption, and it doesn’t take into account any of the customized GTX 770 cards. But it’s at least food for thought.

On a final note, since we’re looking at AMD’s second-tier cards – 290X is still due to arrive – given Sapphire’s $349 MSRP any purchasers may want to hold off for a bit until we have pricing and performance information for AMD’s new top-tier lineup. If they were to deliver a strong $400 card then the 280X Toxic likely wouldn’t make as much sense. But that’s something we won’t know for sure until the 290X is launched. It is however something to at least consider given the significant mark-up on the 280X Toxic over a standard 280X.