Gigabyte has announced a new graphics card – the Radeon R9 280 WindForce OC. This graphics card is simply a Radeon R9 280 graphics card, though it is built on a custom PCB and cooler design.
The GPU clock speeds have been quite notably boosted. Gigabyte has clocked the card with a base frequency of 950 MHz along with a boost frequency of 1072 MHz. For reference, standard R9 280 graphics cards are clocked at 850 MHz base with a 933 MHz boost frequency. The card’s memory remains at the standard 5.0 GHz effective frequency.
Cooling is taken care of by the WindForce 3X cooler. The cooler might appear to be overkill for this card. With the 450 W cooling capacity number supporting that, there is a valid reason for having an unnecessarily beastly cooler on a graphics card: lower noise. A cooler with that much cooling power simply won’t have to work so hard to cool the GPU, reducing noise output under heavy loads.
There was no word on pricing or availability just yet.
