Every once and a while it’s good to get a round up of a set of graphics cards so that you can do an easy comparison. Toms Hardware has done a round up of the Radeon 280X boards. They did not have a base AMD board, apparently their pretty phantom outside of Labs. They have also committed themselves to updating the article regularly as various third party vendors send in new boards.
There is a fair amount of variance in board size ranging from 270mm to 300mm. This could have a big effect depending on what kind of case you are using. The depth is fairly similar between all of the reported manufacturers, which is helpful due to problems that can arise with plugging other devices in if you have a card that’s too wide. The heigh of boards vary widely as well, ranging from 112mm to 139 mm. They weight of the graphics card also vary widely from 769g to 1074g. something to consider if you move your computer around a lot.
Asus seems to have built a reasonably quiet GPU given the power, with an idle of about 30dB and a full load acoustic of about 41dB. If you’re looking for a powerful GPU that you can think over, this might be the best choice, as some of the other GPU’s are quite loud, going all the way up to about 56dB.
To get an overview of performance, take a look at the graphs provided in the article on Toms Hardware. Linked here.