When I spoke about the AMD launch of its new R9 cards, I mentioned that most of the cards are rebadged versions of the 7000 Series cards. That doesn’t mean manufactures couldn’t go out of their way to improve on the designs themselves. Asus attempted this with their flagship R9 280X called the Matrix R9 280X Platinum. The Matrix itself brings a lot of amazing features, but the platinum edition is handpicked and equipped with a higher overclock to go with it all. Today I’m going to take a close look at the card to see what sets it apart from the rest of the R9 280X’s on the market.

When it comes to AMD video card manufactures there really only a few different names that come to mind. At the top of that list for most people will be Sapphire. Those of you who made it out to LanOC v13 will also remember that Sapphire joined us for our event as well. When they offered to let us take a look at their new R9 series cards, I jumped at the chance. Boy was I surprised to see that they had made some significant changed to their product line, especially the Toxic model that we are going to take a look at today.

Every new launch means new custom PCB designs from the manufactures. The first to hit our office this time around was an R9 270X from Gigabyte with their Windforce cooler design and an overclock. In the past I have been impressed with Gigabytes Windforce designs for their pure cooling power, I’m excited to see what three cooling fans on a large heatsink will do for keeping the R9 270X cool. But first let’s take a look at the card.

In the world of Small Form Factor builds you are always compromising. You either have to give up some performance for a smaller size or give up some size to get the performance you are looking for. Recently though, this trend has been starting to change. My last LAN build was easy to carry around while having (at the time) the second fastest GPU from Nvidia and a high end CPU. Of course because of my GPU I couldn’t go any smaller. Asus has a new GPU that is going to change that. Their new GTX 670 Direct CU Mini is the same length of a MiniITX motherboard. With that size, my LAN rig is going to need a complete rebuild.. To go smaller!

If you have been paying attention at all, there has been a lot of talk about what AMD has been up to on the video card side of things. Part of this is related to them inviting some of their press and partners out to Hawaii to show off their upcoming product launch. Why Hawaii? Well this follows their islands name scheme. For those who didn’t make it out there they did a live video stream as well. There they showed off information about the cards but avoided specifications and major details. In place they focused on details about their new focus on in game audio for example.

As impressive as reference cards can be when they are introduced, it’s always impressive to see what all of the manufactures do with them when they have a little time to toy with the overclocks and fit their aftermarket cooling designs. A good example would be the card I’m going to take a look at today. The MSI GTX 760 Hawk looks similar to the GTX 780 Gaming that I recently took a look at, but with a yellow theme that would go perfectly with their new Z87 M Power motherboard. I wonder how it will perform compared to the reference GTX 760 as well as the aftermarket cards. They set the mark high, so MSI is going to have their work cut out for them.

Earlier this year we covered a whole collection of HD 7790’s from various manufactures but there was one missing. I was a little late getting my hands on a Sapphire card and due to other launches I’m even later getting to telling everyone about it. That does mean we have a chance to compare how the HD 7790 is performing now and along with that we get to see how Sapphires Dual-X dual fan cooling design performs. If its anything like the past few aftermarket cooler designs that we have seen from Sapphire I should be very happy.

To finish up our week we have another quick look at the SLI performance of one of Nvidia’s latest cards. This time around I paired up two GTX 780’s and put them through our test suite. Even just a single GTX 780 had more than enough power for most users, so only the most hard core enthusiasts will be considering going with two. For those of you who are, here is an idea of what to expect.

I recently had the chance to check out a couple of Nvidia’s new GTX 760’s. Now that we are past the launch and things have calmed down, I can now also share the results of my SLI testing of those cards as well. It will be interesting to see how they compare to the GTX 770 SLI results as well as single card performance of the GTX 780 itself.

Our first introduction to the new 700 series of cards from Nvidia was impressive and I can say without a doubt that I have enjoyed our time with it through the review and beyond. I was especially impressed with the stock cooler aesthetically, but the performance wasn’t too bad as well. Of course that can be improved on and I finally have a chance to see that now with our latest card to come in, MSI’s GTX 780 Gaming or the N780 Twin Frozr 3GB Overclocked. Every time I have had a Twin Frozr card on the test bench I have been impressed, I wonder if this will be the same. Of course I am going to put it through our test suite to find out.

So up until now we have taken a look at the stock GTX 760 with its single fan, the EVGA GTX 760 with its dual fans, that really only leaves one logical option right? Today I’m going to take a look at the GTX 760 from Gigabyte with their Windforce cooler that packs in a whopping 3 fans. The card is also overclocked a little more than the previous card as well. I’m expecting good performance and I’m very curious about how well Gigabytes Windforce cooling will do because this is our first chance to check out a card with it.

Now that we have taken a look at the GTX 760 from Nvidia, which of course means it is time to see what some of the other manufactures have done with their GTX 760 designs. First up is a look at a card from EVGA called the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX. Some of you might remember the GTX 770 ACX that we recently took a look at, this is very similar. Hopefully the performance that we saw with the GTX 770 ACX will be similar to the GTX 760 ACX; if that is the case we should be very happy with the card. Of course there is only one way to find out, read on to see.

Just this past week I was away on vacation, I came back to a stack of boxes with most of them being video cards. This time, most of them are a new model from Nvidia. Just like with other big launches, the Nvidia GTX 780 was quickly followed up by the GTX 770. To continue filling in gaps in their product line that the GTX 780 launch created Nvidia is launching the GTX 760 that will replace the GTX 660 Ti. Today we are going to take a look at the new GTX 760 and see what it is all about as well as seeing what it is capable in our test suite. The GTX 780 and GTX 770’s were both impressive, I am very curious to see what they will be following them up with.

Yesterday we introduced the GTX 770 and went into detail on what it was all about. We then put both our reference card and the EVGA GTX 770 ACX to the test. I’m sure you guys could guess what I did next right? If I didn’t hook the cards up together in SLI I would have turn in my enthusiast card. I have compiled our results and put them together in this post for everyone to check out. Enjoy!

This morning we introduced you to Nvidia’s latest video card, the GTX 770. Not to spoil to much from the review, (because you really should take a look at it) but not only was I impressed with its performance, I was blown away at the overclock I was able to get on it while running the stock cooler. The fine folks over at EVGA are introducing a few variations on the GTX 770 as well, one of them being their new Active Cooling Xtreme or ACX for short model. We just happened to get our hands on it and I’m going to put it through its paces. We know what the GTX 770 with a reference cooler, but what is it capable of with a little more cooling.

Last week we took a look at the Nvidia GTX 780, their first card in the 700 series of cards. Surprisingly I am sitting here a week later already telling you about their next card: the GTX 770. Is the combination of the GTX 780 and GTX 770 a one-two punch or a hit and a miss? Well in order to find out we had to put it through our benchmark suite to see what it was capable of. I enjoyed the GTX 780; I hope they are able to keep it up with the GTX 770.

It almost feels like we have been seeing the 600 series of cards from Nvidia for a few years now. At a year and two months we are a little past due to see a new generation of cards and today we can finally take the wraps off of NVidia’s latest card, the GTX 780. Rumors have been going around for a while on this launch so let’s just jump right into it and see what it’s all about and then how it performs. One thing is for sure, this will be the start of a lot of exciting cards, and 2013 is going to be a good year!

I hope everyone had a great weekend. Last week we put a couple different video cards to the test including a few HD 7790’s and we were impressed with their performance. Today we are going to take a look at another but this time around from Diamond Multimedia. This is their HD 7790 1GB Overclocked model with a non-reference cooling design as well. It looks nothing like the others that we tested previously and it should be another interesting look at AMD’s latest video card.

Yesterday we took a look at the R7790 from XFX and I was impressed by the HD 7790’s performance. We have a second HD 7790 in hand but this time from Gigabyte. With this being an overclocked card as well with its own unique cooling I am curious how they compare against each other as well as how the Gigabyte HD 7790 1Gb OC holds up against a collection of other cards in our new up to date benchmark test suite.

The AMD product lineup had a small hole in it for a long time between the HD 7770 and the HD 7850. We heard a few rumors about the possibility of an HD 7790 or an HD 7830 and just after LanOC V12 AMD launched their answer the HD 7790. We are a little late to the party, but we have had time to put ours to the test with our revamped benchmark suit that features the latest games. Let’s take a look at how it performs compared to AMD’s other offerings as well as NVidia’s new GTX 650 Ti Boost. Is this a good time to pick up a new video card?