AMD RADEON R9 270X Review

Will the R9 270X strike the perfect balance between performance and value for money? We pitch it against the best value cards on the market today.

Product on Review: AMD Radeon R9 270X
Manufacturer and Sponsor: AMD
Recommended Retail Price: £134.99 – £150 (estimated)

It is coming up to two years since AMD introduced the last series of desktop graphics cards. The 7 series offered ground breaking performance and some significant leaps in gaming technology so this time we are hoping for much of the same. The 7 series cards clawed back much of the headway NVIDIA had gained and the past two years has seen the performance crown swing too and fro with every driver release, price reductions and of course, NVIDIA’s own new family of graphics cards. AMD however have maintained a high proportion of the market share thanks to their aggressive pricing policy which has seen cards such as the HD7950 and HD7850 soar in popularity for those looking for a high performance card which doesn’t cost the Earth. It is this market segment that the AMD R9 270X falls within. A card which promises to deliver value yet performance and lead the pack of graphics cards which fall under the $200 threshold.

Pitched squarely at the feet of the NVIDIA GTX660, AMD are looking to gain a stranglehold on the middle sector and with some impressive specifications, they look all set to do so. The R9 270X is the middle card out of a family. The range topper is the R9 290X, said to compete with both GTX TITAN and GTX 780. Next comes the R9 290. These are classed as AMD’s enthusiast cards. Both the R9 280X and today’s sample, the R9 270X are marketed as the ‘gamer sweet spot’.

We can confirm the R9 270X is not a ‘crippled HD7950’ as reported by some sources nor does it have a Tahiti LE core at its heart. It uses a redesigned Pitcairn core complete with 1280 shaders, a 256-bit memory controller with 2GB to 4GB of GDDR5 at its helm. Clockspeeds will inevitably vary between manufacturers but the reference design is clocked to a healthy 1050MHz and a memory clockspeed of 5600MHz (effective). With these figures we fully expect the card to overthrow the GTX660 and with a price point starting at $199 with the inevitable premiums added for factory overclocks, aftermarket cooling etc it is fair to assume this price will increase further bringing it in line with the GTX760 and AMD’s own HD7950 cards which are much stronger opponents and why we will also include them in our run of benchmarks.

We have a lot to get through today though so go put the kettle on, sit back as we take you through AMD’s ‘value for money’ card.

GCN & Mantle

The award-winning Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture in the AMD Radeon R9 and R7 Series graphics cards continues to serve as a driving force behind the Unified Gaming Strategy, AMD’s approach to providing a consistent gaming experience on the PC, in the living room or over the cloud — all powered by AMD Radeon graphics found in AMD graphics cards and accelerated processing units (APUs). The four pillars of the Unified Gaming Strategy — console, cloud, content and client — come together with the introduction of Mantle.

With Mantle, games like DICE’s “Battlefield 4” will be empowered with the ability to speak the native language of the Graphics Core Next architecture, presenting a deeper level of hardware optimization no other graphics card manufacturer can match. Mantle also assists game developers in bringing games to life on multiple platforms by leveraging the commonalities between GCN-powered PCs and consoles for a simple game development process.

Specification

As you can see from the specifications above, the R9 270X features 1280 shaders. It also has 32 ROPs which results in a pixel and texture fillrate of around 33.6GPixel/s and 84 GTexels/s respectively.

Pitcairn

While the 290x heralds the dawn of a new age with a huge 512bit memory controller, the R9 270X retains the 256-bit memory bus found on older cards. We were hoping AMD would see fit to increase this to at least a 384bit controller but alas, the more we look at the specifications of this card, the more we see it as a re-hash of the HD7870. After all, why would it be different? Both cards are based on the Pitcairn core, the 270X has simply been overclocked from the 1GHz HD7870 edition we saw last year to 1050MHz on the core. The memory has also received a healthy 200MHz boost to 1400MHz (5600 effective). The typical board power of 180W is also in line with the HD7870 as this had a typical draw of 175W so it isn’t any more power efficent either.

None of this is bad of course, it’s just we were expecting a little more from AMD. We already know how good the HD7870/50 cards are for the money and after two years we would think AMD would have introduced something a little more innovative for it’s mid range cards. Re-badging cards is not a bad thing if it means the end users is getting last years flagship performance at a cut-down cost but as you can see above, the specifications show us that the 270X is, on the face of it at least, a re-hash of the HD7870, itself a mid-range GPU that is now nearing end of life.

Hopefully the benchmarks will show us some magic because thus far, we are less than impressed.

AMD Zerocore Power Efficiency

AMD ZEROCORE POWER

ENABLING THE WORLD’S MOST POWER EFFICIENT GPUS

When a discrete GPU is in a static screen state it works to minimize idle power by enabling a host of active power saving functions including (but not limited to); clock gating, power gating, memory compression, and a host of other features. However, GPUs with AMD’s exclusive AMD ZeroCore Power technology can take energy savings to entirely new heights by completely powering down the core GPU while the rest of the system remains active. Nearly all PCs can be configured to turn off their displays after a long period of inactivity. This is known as the long idle state; where the screen is blanked but the rest of the system remains in an active and working power state (ACPI G0/S0).

As soon as the system goes into long idle state and applications are not actively changing the screen contents, the GPU enters the AMD ZeroCore power state. In the AMD ZeroCore power state, the GPU core (including the 3D engine / compute units, multimedia and audio engines, displays, memory interfaces, etc.) is completely powered down. However, one cannot simply remove the GPU and its associated device context completely; particularly when it is the
only GPU in the system as is the case in many enthusiast platforms. The operating system and SBIOS must still be aware that a GPU is still present in the system. For this reason, the AMD ZeroCore Power state maintains a very small bus control block to ensure that GPU context is still visible to the operating system and SBIOS. The AMD ZeroCore power state also manages the power sequencing of the GPU to ensure that the power up/down mechanism is self contained
and independent of the rest of the system.

The enablement of the AMD ZeroCore Power feature is controlled by the driver. The driver monitors the display contents and allows the GPU to enter the AMD ZeroCore Power in the condition that the GPU enters long idle and subsequent work requests are no longer being submitted to the engine. If any applications update the screen contents, AMD ZeroCore Power technology can periodically wake the GPU to update the framebuffer contents and put the GPU
back into the AMD ZeroCore Power state. Furthermore, applications such as Windows 7 desktop gadgets are architected to minimize activity and save power in the long idle state. These applications are active during screen on mode to display dynamic content such as weather, RSS feeds, stock symbols, system status, etc. but also have the intelligence to suspend any updates and activity when the system enters long idle. These applications will not wake the
GPU from the AMD ZeroCore Power state in long idle.

AMD ZeroCore Power technology delivers tremendous energy savings. Many PCs remain in the long idle state for a variety of use cases that are highly relevant to everyday consumers, enthusiasts and professionals. In AMD ZeroCore Power mode, users can still enjoy non‐graphics activities such as file serving/streaming, motherboard audio and music, and remote access while the GPU core is essentially powered off.

GCN Technology

Available on select, high-performance AMD Radeon™ R9 and HD 7000 Series graphics products, the Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture is a radically new approach to the design of a consumer GPU.

Designed to push not only the boundaries of DirectX® 11.2 gaming, the GCN Architecture is also AMD’s first design specifically engineered for general computing. Equipped with up to 32 compute units (2048 stream processors), each containing a scalar coprocessor, AMD’s 28nm GPUs are more than capable of handling workloads-and programming languages-traditionally exclusive to the processor. Coupled with the dramatic rise of GPU-aware programming languages like C++ AMP and OpenCL™, the GCN Architecture is truly the right architecture for the right time.

Performance

In simple terms, increasing the number of transistors in a GPU has a big impact on the potential performance of a graphics card-but transistors alone are not enough. It takes a truly great design, like the GCN Architecture, to effectively utilize that potential for real-world performance.

Below you will find just a few examples of how this truly next-generation architecture delivers on one very simple design goal: enable the world’s most powerful graphics cards.1

Starting with GPU utilization, AMD has taken great strides to ensure that the GCN Architecture is capable of efficiently using its hardware resources. This seems like such a simple idea, but designing a GPU to frequently approach its peak theoretical performance is a challenge the GCN Architecture tackles with ease.

The GCN Architecture is designed for improved utilization, which ensures that the GPU is making optimal use of its resources for maximum performance.

The GCN Architecture also benefits from dramatically improved tessellation performance. Games featuring this DirectX® 11 technology are considerably faster than they were on the previous generation of AMD Radeon™ products. There is also the new Mantle API which promises to dominate NVIDIA, especially in titles such as Battlefield 4. Project Mantle is one of AMD’s most innovative and game-changing features, delivered with the Radeon™ R9 and R7 Series product line. Mantle is a new application programming interface (API), leveraging the commonality between the next-gen consoles and Radeon™. It enables game developers direct communication to our GPUs, unlocking the true potential of GCN and resulting in significantly higher gaming performance at all segments. We will be looking at Mantle in a separate article but if what we hear is correct, Microsoft (who are responsible for DirectX) should be very worried.

Every gamer knows that the GPU’s clockspeed also has a big impact on the performance of a graphics card, and the GCN Architecture keeps that in mind.

But what many don’t know is that every graphics card is designed to draw only a certain amount of power from your PC’s power supply. This is called the Thermal Design Profile, or TDP, and it’s critical that the GPU architecture is capable of making the most of every watt. The GCN Architecture can do that thanks to a technology called AMD PowerTune technology.

AMD PowerTune is an intelligent system that performs real-time analysis of the games and applications that utilize a GPU. Examples of such software might include Battlefield 3 or Furmark. In the event that an application is not making the most of the power available to the GPU, AMD PowerTune can improve that application’s performance by raising the GPU’s clockspeed by up to 30%! Best of all, this technology is completely automatic and is designed specifically to improve gaming performance.

Available on all 28nm AMD Radeon™ products, AMD PowerTune is designed to enable significantly higher clockspeeds in your favorite games-automatically!

Image Quality

But performance is not enough for today’s demanding gamers. Image quality, or the clarity and accuracy of textures and effects, is equally important. The GCN Architecture is equipped with three key technologies that dramatically raise the bar in this regard.

Partially Resident Textures (PRT)
Even in the latest titles, gamers may have noticed that games often re-use or repeat textures, particularly on the ground or in background scenery such as mountains or trees. This is because increasing the physical size or number of textures in a game can have a negative impact on the performance of a GPU. PRT is a radical new technology that hopes to break this cycle.

PRT can utilize absolutely enormous texture files, up to 32 terabytes large, with minimal performance impact. PRT accomplishes this by streaming small bits of these massive textures into the GPU as needed, giving compatible games a virtually endless supply of unique texture data it can apply to the game world. The GCN Architecture in 28nm AMD Radeon™ products is the first GPU design to feature a hardware implementation of this technology.

Partially Resident Textures (PRT) enables future games to utilize ultra-high resolution textures with the same performance as today’s small and often repetitive textures.

Improved Anisotropic Filtering (AF)

Available on every modern GPU, anisotropic filtering is a technique that assists the GPU in making sure textures in your favorite games remain razor sharp, even at a distance. Most games now offer the ability to enable this feature, and the AMD Catalyst™ driver suite has long provided players with the option to force enable anisotropic filtering for all of their games.

Where every GPU design differs, however, is in the way the anisotropic filtering is actually executed. The GCN Architecture has been specifically optimized to produce superior results when AF is enabled.

Improved anisotropic filtering in products like the AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 Series ensure gamers get sharper, better textures when this technology is enabled.

Improved DirectX® 11 Tessellation
As DirectX® 11 titles become more mature, game developers are naturally pushing the envelope of realism by utilizing a greater degree of special rendering effects. One such effect is tessellation, which can dynamically generate additional detail in a scene on the fly.

A wireframe scene of a rally car in DiRT 3 driving through water. On the left, notice there are no ripples. On the right, after tessellation, there is new and dynamic detail in the game.

As with anisotropic filtering, tessellation is not new to GPUs, but the manner in which tessellation is executed can have a large impact on the gaming experience. Because of this, the GCN Architecture has again been optimized to deliver up to 4x the performance of the AMD Radeon™ HD 6000 Series in heavily-tessellated games.

First Look

The new cooler is a slight change from the older design. The plastic shroud is matt blacks as opposed to gloss black and is also ridged, with red inserts and faux venting. Overall, we feel the look is more aggressive than the previous incarnation, much more angular than sleek.

The fan is once again at the end of the card and pulls air in both from the fan opening and a small side cutout. The air is then forced over the heatsink and pushed out of the rear of the card.

the rear of the card is nothing extra ordinary rather is is a matt black PCB with the now familiar Radeon GPU brace holding the cooler in position.

From this angle we can see that AMD have opted not to slap ‘RADEON’ alongside the card other than a small logo near the power ports. Toward the input/output area we can also see there is a small venting area. This is in addition to the rear exhaust however this vent will release hot air back into the PC enclosure which defeats the object of a full shroud design.

The card measures 240mm long so about the same width as an ATX motherboard and 35mm thick making it a dual slot graphics card.

The I/O area features DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. The card can support up to 6 displays with an additional DisplayPort 1.2 MST multihub. It can also use 3 different ports simultaneously so if you have 3 monitors, you can use any of the ports and theoretically, the card will be able to display from whichever of the four ports you choose.

As the picture above shows, twin 6pin PCIe Power plugs will be required for the card. The power requirements of the R9 270X are 500W (600W for Crossfire).

As with the 7800 series of graphics cards, the R9 270X has a single Crossfire tab meaning it can be paired up to another single AMD card from the same family.

Let’s take a closer look…

Closer Look

The intake and exhaust vents are discrete however the problem with having small vents usually means more noise is created. We will be examining the noise of the card later in the review.

Removing the cooler was easy thanks to the four screws which are used to attached the cooler to the card. there are more screws to remove but these hold the midplate/brace to the card and do not restrict removal of the heatsink/shroud.

The base plate is full copper and is attached to the longitudinal aluminium finned heatsink array via 3 copper heatpipes.

The VRM feature a 5 phase power design, which is again, identical to the HD7870 albeit different in orientation.

Keeping these voltages in check is the CHiL 82253 controller. At present, none of the popular software overclocking applications we tried could increase the voltage of the core or memory.

The memory chips hail from Hynix and carry the product code of H5GQ2H24AFR R0C rather than the T2C chips found on the HD7870 so should allow for some very good overclocking results if past experience is anything to go by.

Finally, we reach the core of the GPU, codenamed Pitcairn. Interestingly, the new core is built in Thailand rather than China. Pitcairn is a trimmed down version of the Tahiti core found on the HD79XX series of GPU’s so with the increased clockspeed on the R9 270X, the deficit may be equalised.

I guess it’s time we found out…

Test Setup & Testing Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphic card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and where possible the same drivers unless a newer driver rectifies an issue we have encountered or significantly improves performance to such an extent that continuing with an outdated driver is not feasible.

Frame Time Analysis
We have also seen the emergence of frame time analysis. We covered this in a separate article here: GPU Reviews: Why Frame Time Analysis is important so we won’t go into the reasoning again but to summarise, our testing comprises both FPS testing and perhaps arguably more importantly, frame time analysis. We also look at overall performance by equating averages across the games and finally before concluding our review we take a look at value for money.

HardwareWith the latest Intel chipset release we decided to update our ageing X58 setup to the new X79 chipset. Not only that but we will be using the flagship Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to 4.5GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB of ram on board there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

Mid-Range Graphics cards on test:

AMD R9 270X 2GB GDDR5
(AMD CAT 13.11 beta)
NVIDIA GTX760 2GB GDDR5(Forceware 320.39)
SAPPHIRE HD7950 3GB GDDR5(AMD CAT 13.3 beta)
HIS HD7850 IceQ X 1GB GDDR5(AMD CAT 13.3 beta)
HIS HD7790 IceQ Turbo 1GB GDDR5 (AMD CAT 13.3 beta)
MSI GeForce GTX 650Ti BOOST OC 2GB GDDR5 (Forceware 314.22)

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 Pro
CPU: Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition @ 4.5GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 1866MHz 9-10-9-27
Power Supply – Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 1200W
Hard Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB
Cooler – Corsair H100

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we have chosen:

Battlefield 3
Crysis 3
Far Cry 3
BioShock Infinite
DiRT: Showdown
The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included 3 of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Temperature, Acoustics and Power Consumption

Power Consumption

To test for power consumption we use the included iPower Meter found with our Thortech PSU. As system load figures obviously differ from idle it is extremely difficult to get an accurate figure of system draw and then simply take this figure away from the overall amount because each game will generate varying levels of CPU and hard drive activity. Dynamic power adjustments which fluctuate in game will also affect accurate power figures thus rendering any such power consumption calculations redundant at worst and approximate at best.

We will therefore take our system readings averaged over a benchmark run of Tessmark (100% load) and after 20 minutes of being idle in Windows 7. These can then be used as a comparison to other graphics cards to determine how much more or less power you can expect a GPU to consume.

The AMD R9 270X is clearly more power efficient than the HD7850 and out performs both NVIDIA cards on test. If you value power efficiency then the new AMD card is certainly the card to go for.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests, we would normally run Furmark for 20 minutes, taking the absolute maximum temperature attained however we found that this throttled the card and resulted in spurious results. So we set Heaven running continuously for 20 minutes and used this as a temperature result as the card did not throttle with this application.

The redesigned cooler didn’t work any miracles here I’m afraid. While 74c is not exactly scorching, it is a long way off the HD7850. It’s saving grace however is that ran cooler than the NVIDIA GTX760. It should be noted however that when overclocked, we ran the card with the fan at 100% and while noisy, temperatures were excellent so we are certain that given some tweaking to the fan profiles, a perfect equilibrium between noise and cooling power can be found.

Acoustics

The HD 7XXX series had a very good cooler. Under idle conditions it ran near silently and even under load it didn’t break too much of a sweat, rising to a murmur. The new cooler mirrors that performance, staying relatively quiet throughout the testing. The cooler is however extremely noisy when manually adjusted to 100%.

Gaming Experience (Frame Time Analysis)

Gaming experience is what we like to refer to as the Laymans term for Frame Time analysis. Frame time analysis is in its most basic sense how smooth your gameplay will be. Ever had a powerful card rendering at 100FPS with ease for it to stall for a split second before resuming? This is what Frame Time Analysis shows us: The peaks during an otherwise smooth gaming experience. This is presented to you in two ways, by showing you a line graph of a 60 second FTA capture using FRAPS and then by deducing the average and 99th percentile response times.

Some claim this should be the way graphics cards are tested and we won’t argue here because there is little point in having a card which churns out an average 100FPS if it has micro stutters lasting 50ms (GPU response time) which spoils the fluidity of the game.

Comment

The graphs above may appear very daunting however, what you want to see is a smooth line (not fuzzy) with very few peaks and troughs. While you are unlikely to notice peaks and troughs below 30ms, any peak above 30ms may be seen as a stutter during gameplay. This will however depend greatly on your own perceptions.

Average and 99th Percentile response times (Frame Time Analysis)

Here we take a look at both average (black) and 99th Percentile (coloured) response times of the graphics cards. It is highly unlikely a user will notice any micro stutter (also incorrectly referred to as lag but the effect can be interpreted to be similar) at anything below 30ms but every gamers perception differs.

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike (Synthetic)

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

Unigine: Heaven 4 (Synthetic)

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

Unigine: Valley (Synthetic)

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

Battlefield 3 (FPS)

Battlefield 3 leaps ahead of its time with the power of Frostbite™ 2, the next instalment of DICE’s cutting-edge game engine. This state-of-the-art technology is the foundation on which Battlefield 3 is built, delivering enhanced visual quality, a grand sense of scale, massive destruction, dynamic audio and incredibly lifelike character animations. As bullets whiz by, walls crumble, and explosions throw you to the ground, the battlefield feels more alive and interactive than ever before. In Battlefield 3, players step into the role of the elite U.S. Marines where they will experience heart-pounding missions across diverse locations including Paris, Tehran and New York.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the parking lot scene on Operation Sword Breaker. High and Ultra presets were loaded at both resolutions.

Crysis 3 (FPS)

Crysis 3 from Electronic Arts is the fourth instalment of the Crysis franchise and sequel to Crysis 2. It uses the CryEngine 3 gaming engine which is perhaps the most advanced gaming engine to date and therefore the most demanding. The meme ‘Can it run Crysis’ has never been so apparent…

Far Cry 3 (FPS)

Far Cry 3 is a tropical survival shooter video game from Ubisoft Montreal and Massive studios. It’s open world design has similar traits to it’s forbear Far Cry 2 but it does it all so much better. With stunning visuals and settings to bring a PC to it’s knee’s, this game is so much more than the ‘just another console port’ it was reported to be.

BioShock Infinite (FPS)

Set in 1912 during the growth of American exceptionalism, BioShock Infinite is a thrid person shooter developed by Irrational games and published by 2K Games. It is the third instalment of the BioShock franchise. the game utilises the Unreal Engine 3, modifying it with their own lighting engine to present a visually stunning experience like no other.

DiRT: Showdown (FPS)

DiRT Showdown is the new arcade racing game from the team that brought you the award-winning DiRT series, uncaged in 2012. Pick up and play controls combine with electrifying events, frenzied crowds and stunning graphics to deliver high octane, dive in and drive thrills from event one.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (FPS)

Skyrim is not a direct successor to the very popular Oblivion. Instead it takes place 200 years after the events of Oblivion. The non-linear playing that made the Elder Scrolls such a popular series does however make a return along with the beautiful scenery the encompasses the world of Skyrim.

Average and minimum frames per second were measured using Fraps during the drop down passage to Riverwood. V-sync was disabled to allow fluctuating (higher the 60) FPS for these runs. It is however recommended that v-sync is left enabled during normal gameplay due to the games dynamics.

Value For Money

For those on a budget, this is perhaps the most important section of a graphics card review. For everyone else it will certainly make you think twice before calling the bank manager for an overdraft request. We calculate Value for money by taking the cost of the product and then dividing that figure by the overall performance figure which gives us a result in the guise of £ per frame – in effect how much every frame per second will cost you.

Overclocking

For overclocking our AMD cards we will be using MSI Afterburner as this gives us all of the options we require.

Above is a screenshot of GPU-Z showing the reference clockspeeds and ASIC quality of our sample.

We managed a full 165MHz above the reference speeds along with a 210MHz overclock on the memory equating to a memory clockspeed of 7240MHz (effective). If this is what a reference design is capable of we can’t wait to see what the board partners have in store for us!

The resulting overclock allowed a decent improvement on the Heaven 4.0 benchmark with an extra 128 points gained for free.

Conclusion

It is easy to get carried away with the euphoria and excitement when a new family of graphics cards are unleashed to the public. Mindful of this fact we set out to give you, the reader, an honest and objective appraisal of this particular graphics card. Suffice to say, it has its good and not so good points.

The R9 270X is aimed squarely at the mid-range sector. AMD themselves are comparing the R9 270X to the NVIDIA GTX660 which weighs in at the same price. In that comparison the AMD card is a clear winner. Compare it against the NVIDIA mid range card, the GTX760 and the results are less than favourable towards AMD. The GTX760 is however more expensive so if we are comparing on a price vs. price and not simply the equivalent card, we would herald the AMD R9 270X a success. As far as release date prices go, the R9 270X is something of a bargain. At the time of going to press we had not got a definite price other than $199 which as history tells us, cannot directly be converted to pounds. We estimate however that you can expect to pay between £135 and £150 for a reference model and around £180 for a custom cooled model making the R9 270X great value for money.

It would however, be foolish to compare release date prices without taking into consideration current market prices. The recent price drops to the HD79XX series have made them the current ‘bang per buck’ card of choice. Specifically the outgoing HD7950 which is priced very aggressively. Couple this with some extra ordinary deals available for the GTX670 at the moment. These deals will however only last as long as supplies allow so once they are depleted, the R9 270X will appear much better value for money against say a GTX760 if prices hold at today’s level. For now though, if you can stretch a to little more than the estimated asking price of between £135-£150 there are some great deals to be had on ‘older’ hardware.

This may all sound a little negative towards the R9 270X. In fairness, it isn’t a bad card, far from it however we cannot escape the fact it is based on two year old technology with it’s Pitcairn (or Curacao as it is now renamed) core, just tweaked a little. NVIDIA are also guilty of re-badging cards to use up excess silicon so neither can take the morale high ground here. We can only hope that the high end graphics cards from AMD (which we have in store for the 10th October) offer more a intuitive design and the ground breaking performance we have come to expect from a new AMD product.

To summarise:
The R9 270X is a good mid-range graphics card that can outstrip the competition at the same price point. Sadly this is due to an increase in clockspeed and new drivers rather than new technological advances.

Pros
+ Good Overclocking
+ Competitive performance
+ Enhanced Clockspeeds
+ Very good price point
+ Available with 4GB GDDR5

Cons
– Retains ‘old’ Pitcairn technology