It's a great time to be in the market for a video card. AMD and Nvidia are duking it out for our hard-earned cash, and it's the consumers who benefit from the battle royale through better performing GPUs at an unbelievably low price.The saying in the GPU market used to be there are no free lunches, meaning what you pay for is the performance you'll get. But AMD has changed all that with its fierce pricing strategy ? giving consumers seriously strong performance per dollar spent.Asus has come into the graphics card market with a killer mid-range AMD offering: its R9 280 DirectCU II TOP. Like other AMD Radeon R9 280s, the DirectCU II TOP features a base clock speed of 850MHz and a boost speed of 980MHz, but the card also sports 1792 stream processors, 3GB of video RAM, and a 250W TDP rating.