Card Layout and Photos
So for this year, most of the cards that I have seen from Sapphire have been their Tri-X cards with amazing cooling. With a name like Dual-X I think it’s obvious that this isn’t a triple fan design this time around. The Dual-X cooler design may have fewer fans but Sapphire did pack the largest fans they possibly could into the card. To do this the cooling design is actually taller than the PCB. The fan shroud design is a little less interesting than the other Sapphire cards with its silver and black design. That isn’t a big issue though, I think the silver and black shroud will go with more builds than the brighter colors.
As usual the aftermarket cooling design blows down over the heatsink where a reference design pushes air right to left to blow the air out the back of the card. This can be seen in the photos below. We can also see the heatpipes Sapphire used to pull the heat away from the GPU and out over the heatsink. The top bottom, and right side of the card are open aired meaning this card will push some warmed air into your case as well.
Just like with the 280X Toxic that I took a look at previously, the Dual-X R9 280 OC has the sapphire button up on the top edge next to the crossfire connections. This button turns on a UEFI BIOS that will give you faster boot and resume times when working with Windows 8 and motherboards that have UEFI BIOS’ as well.
For power connections, the Dual-X R9 280 OC requires two 6-pin connections to keep things running. This is in line with a reference 280; the R9 280X requires an 8-pin and a 6-pin. If you look, you can see where there is room for an 8-pin header due to this being the same PCB as the R9 280X.
For connections Sapphire stuck with the standard options with the Dual-X R9 280 OC. You get two DVI connections with one having the analog pass-through that is required for DVI to VGA adapters. You also get HDMI and DisplayPort connections, both being full sized.
On the flip side of the Dual-X R9 280 things are a little boring with the bright blue PCB. Those of you building a blue themed build won’t mind but in other builds the blue will stand out a lot compared to a nice flat black PCB that most people tend to favor.
