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MSI R9 280x Gaming Edition - Unimpressed

Neil79

Neil79

Neil79

Caporegime
Joined
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Apart from the tattered bashed up box that I got in my delivery I'm less than impressed with the overclockability of the card. At this present time I'm stuck with 1125mhz and a memory clock of 1600. I have yet to test a higher memory clock but the core is lacking and this is coming down to the volts!

Whenever I went over 1125 I'd get artifacts or driver has not responding errors and looking at my voltages I can see they were not very stable. So I went into Msi Afterburner, unlocked the voltages and tried to see what I could get out of the card.

According to many reviews of this card they all attained between 1.25v and 1.3v however it seems that I and a lot of other buyers not reviewers are stuck with a max volt of about 1.2v or much lower in apps like Furmark. Those in reviews to get atleast 1150 or higher on the core used 1.25v and up to 1.3v.

I was playing battlefield 4 and the volts went up to about 1.21 but quickly vrooping to 1.18v (53C-58C). In furmark and kombuster the volts are only maxing out at 1.156v! In such I'm very dissapointed in the attainable voltages and in reading other forums it also seems that for some reason MSI have put in a safety limit for customers. Oh and unlike the reviewers, you can't overclock the memory volts AT ALL! :mad:

Currently I'm set as

Fan 85%
Volts - 100mv+
Power Limit - +20%
CORE - 1125MHZ
MEM - 1600MHZ

No I know why they were on offer :o

ps I do understand that every card is different, but unless I can try for higher volts I'll never know!
 
Last edited:
Suarez7 said:
Should stuck with nvidia Neil
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Most likely, but I'll have to be careful thinking that or I'll get suspended again

My 560ti and 660 were awesome cards! The reason I went for this, apart from the price was the great reviews and it's MSI. I had MSI for my 660 and was impressed just not with the frame rates in some games :p
 
Neil79 said:
Most likely, but I'll have to be careful thinking that or I'll get suspended again

My 560ti and 660 were awesome cards! The reason I went for this, apart from the price was the great reviews and it's MSI. I had MSI for my 660 and was impressed just not with the frame rates in some games :p
Click to expand...

I'm running MSI 780Ti's absolutely fantastic cards, MSI had a tough job taming Hawaii on the 290X, can't blame them for that tbh, what's that old saying? You can't polish a .....?

;)

DSR time, come back to the dark side..
 
Boomstick777 said:
I'm running MSI 780Ti's absolutely fantastic cards, MSI had a tough job taming Hawaii on the 290X, can't blame them for that tbh, what's that old saying? You can't polish a .....?

;)

DSR time, come back to the dark side..
Click to expand...

All I read was great reviews, if I can try for higher volts I'll be happy!

There must be a way, surely it's not hardware locked
 
^^ I didn't even link the tis :P - honestly couldn't justify the price of the tis myself - especially as my GHZ edition boosts to stock (reference) 780ti performance out the box and still has 10% overclocking on top of that.
 
Frenzy said:
For the money I wasn't impressed when I got one either.
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Same

It's just a lot of faffing about returning a card that so far works ( just not as expected ) and adding in the extra delivery charge

Here's my 2 star review of the card on main website -

I purchased this card about a week ago and to be honest I'm less than impressed. Although the card looks fantastic and sounds very quiet, it's overclockability is not impressive at all. For some reason MSI in their wisdom have decided to voltage lock the card which means you will be limited when using msi afterburner. All the online reviews sound good but it's not until you get the card you understand why it was a week deal.

You also have to modify msi afterburner to get it to even read the volt's properly. It artifacts over 1120 core because of this and also the card suffers from vdroop. So don't expect a great overclocker, there are also many reports of cards being returned to faults such as fan problems and core issues. Forgot to mention, you can also NOT overclock memory volts which goes against what reviews have been saying.
Click to expand...
 
Apparently the MSI Gaming isn't all that good, the Sapphire ones are better, its also hit and miss with GPU's.

I had a Gigabyte WF3 that would not go over 1150Mhz no matter what i did to it, while others i knew got them past 1200Mhz no problem, some even getting them past 1300Mhz.

I now have a Powercolor, (apparently a lesser quality GPU) i run that at more than 1200 / 1600 for daily gaming no problem, it will easily go past 1250Mhz if pushed, perhaps as high as 1300Mhz in short bursts.

You got unlucky.
 
The thing is, if you switch to a GTX 780 (non-Ti) then you're going to need to overclock it quite a lot to just get the same performance that you already have.

You'll probably need 1200 MHz+ on a GTX 780 to match an R9 290X at 1120 MHz. And while that's certainly achievable on a GTX 780, I'm not sure how common it is (it's certainly not common to get that high in reviews). And then if you do hit 1200 MHz, that equals what you have now, you'll need higher than that to actually gain anything.

Just a thought.
 
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