Is the Sapphire Raedon R9 280X overclocked or...

Nah the one you have is still a top card! Only the one i showed you was a tiny bit faster, not worth ripping out and forking out on a new one!

Aurondium said:

Thanks, Devlin. Appreciate your help, but I'm still left with unanswered question.

Is it safe for me to use the OC card with my present system where I only have the three built in Corsair case fans and the standard fan that came with the i5 processor- i.e., I have no heat sink like EVO. The card has two fans, too, if I recall correctly.

I do possess an Evo hyper 212 heat sink - I just decided not to fit it because I hadn't twigged the sapphire card was overclocked.

Are you suggesting I could leave my system as is and use the card (without overclocking it any farther, which I have no interest in doing) or do you feel it preferable I take my build apart and fit the EVO? I don't know what heat the card might develop and the review stuff is gobbledygook to me.



It's my first build, I'm long in the tooth, and I'm taking wee steps at a time. Appreciate all the help here and will decide what to do once I've chewed all your advice over.

My new build system specs are above- not in the My System specs link below.

just leave it as is Mantle will pick up any struggle you're having it's ok as is don't wreck yourself over it

Temps should be fine buddy!

Aurondium said:

Very interesting, Solarstarshines. :)

I was close to using Catalyst this afternoon to load any updated driver but hesitated. I have to stop now but will pick up here again tomorrow after reading about Mantle, and may then take the plunge with catalyst.

Meantime, thank you. All you folk are so helpful.

So far I've nothing on my 1TB Mechanical Drive D and am still creeping through the initial installs on my 120Gb SSD C Drive. Great fun.

And thanks again to you, Devlin. I'm feeling better already. :):)

I would still use CCC it will help you make fan profiles that will assure you of excellent temps my old HD7970's aka R9-280x ran at 33c Idle about 70c Heavy Gaming ans i have a Dual GPU set up

The catalyst is very handy! I do all my overclocking(CPU) through the AMD catalyst, it also allows me to switch between crossfire/single GPU as well as force settings like vsync and triple buffering and openGL etc, You can use speccy to see your temps, you can get it from here Speccy - System Information - Free Download

And if you prefer something a little more portable you can use core temp(shows temps on all cores down the bottom right of the task bar) and you can find that here - Core Temp