Sapphire Radeon R7 260X: A Great Linux Graphics Card

For being a graphics card aimed for those on a modest budget and casual gamers, the Sapphire Radeon R7 260X has a very capable heatsink for this Bonaire XTX graphics card. There are aluminum fins and two heatpipes running through the graphics card topped by a fan that isn't loud at all -- even under load. Later in this article are our thermal and power consumption results under Linux.

The max TDP for the R7 260X is 115 Watts and thus requires a single six-pin PCI Express power connector for sufficient power.

Connectors on this graphics card include one single-link DVI, one dual-link DVI, HDMI 1.4a, and DisplayPort 1.2. The GPU does support driving up to four displays simultaneously with AMD's Eyefinity technology, but for a graphics card with only 2GB of video memory, this may not work too well depending upon the resolutions of the display. For those curious about the overall state of multi-monitor support on Linux with the different graphics drivers, check out Quad-Monitor AMD/NVIDIA Linux Gaming: What You Need To Know.

The 28nm GCN graphics processor is capable of supporting Microsoft DirectX 11.2, OpenGL 4.3, and Mantle, but only worth noting for Linux users at this time is the OpenGL support. AMD has expressed interest of having Mantle on Linux but so far we haven't seen any driver activity materialize. In terms of the Linux OpenGL support, with the Catalyst driver the R7 260X can supply OpenGL 4.3 compliance while the RadeonSI open-source driver in its current stable form only handles OpenGL 3.1 (or even OpenGL 2.1 in an older configuration with outdated LLVM) while OpenGL 3.3 just landed this week in mainline Mesa.