The AMD Radeon R9 270X & R9 270 Review: Feat. Asus & HIS
by Ryan Smith on November 13, 2013 12:01 AM ESTMeet The AMD Radeon R9 270X
We’ll start off with our sole 270X card, AMD’s reference Radeon R9 270X. Unfortunately this is one of those cases where the reference card hasn’t been picked up by their partners for their own use, so this card isn’t going to be available at retail. The partners have all gone with their various standard open air cooler designs – honed from the 7870 – which means that a 270X with a blower will unfortunately not be available. The open air coolers do well when it comes to noise, but in this segment it’s nice to have a blower or two available for cramped OEM systems.
In any case, the reference 270X is a very natural evolution of the 7870 that came before it. AMD has kept the same board length of 9.5”, so in terms of functionality and size little has changed. And of course the livery has been done to match the GTX 290 series, featuring the same style shroud and the same fan used to complete AMD’s flagship cards.
Cracking open the reference 270X, we can see that AMD has gone with the same design principles internally too. The 270X is designed like a smaller 290, right down to the metal baseplate providing cooling for various discrete power components and the RAM chips. Meanwhile the heatsink is a scaled down version of the heatsink AMD used on 290, retaining the same general fin structure but forgoing the vapor chamber for a triple copper heatpipe design. Though the placement of the heatpipes strikes us as a bit odd; they’re directly in the channel that air should be going through, and where the 290 had more heatsink instead.
Moving on to I/O, the reference 270X utilizes AMD’s new reference design of 2x DL-DVI-D, 1x HDMI, and 1x DisplayPort. Compared to the 7800 series AMD has dropped the two Mini DisplayPorts for a single full-size DisplayPort, and brought back the second DVI port. Whether partner cards use this implementation or not is largely going to depend on whether partners utilize new board designs; if partners reuse 7800 series board designs, then they’re likely to have 1 DL-DVI port and 2 Mini DisplayPorts, and otherwise it will be AMD’s reference design.
Finally, as a 180W card the 270X has the standard 6-pin + 6-pin PCIe power sockets. It’s only rated for 180W, so this will provide ample power and then-some.
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Will Robinson - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
What!...no hatchet job on these new cards from Wreckage?The hurt just keeps on coming eh Wrecky?
just4U - Thursday, November 14, 2013 - link
It's not beating the 760 so his stocks are safe... for now. Besides, you need to give him a break. Poor man must be tired after the release of the 780Ti and 290/X.geniekid - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Would really have liked to see CFX numbers.Da W - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Agreed, i need to compare 270X crossfire performance/heat/noise to a single 290X.Right now i'm hesitating, for my 3 monitor setup:
1. Dual 270X for 400$. -Advantage of lower cost, lower heat, lower noise, turn off one GPU when not gaming. Don't know if it's strong enough for 3600X1920.
2. Single 290 for 450$. -Best price/performance, noisy, hot.
3. Single GTX 780 superclocked for 530$. - If only for Nvidia cooler and energy efficiency, else i'm an AMD guy.
4. Single 290X for 550$. -I would pick this over vanilla 290 for chip binning, it should have higher quality GPU as far as energy concumption goes.
Titan and 780ti are above my budget.
garadante - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
I'm strongly doubting two of these would game at 3600x1920 comfortable. That's almost 4k resolution. Remember that any AMD card below the 290 series still uses the Crossfire bridge and can't transfer 4k resolution frame buffers through it. Making the second card completely useless as the buffer is just dropped instead. And I haven't seen technical info yet, but I wonder if that's part of the reason why the 290 series outperforms the 780/780 Ti in 4k gaming so well. Perhaps the SLI bridge is also becoming a bottleneck, depending on how it handles frame buffers.For that resolution, personally I'd say waiting for aftermarket 290s and 290Xs would be a good choice. Get either much better binned chips in a high end aftermarket 290 or 290X, better thermals, and acoustics for both (and thus better overclocking headroom). With the performance those cards were getting at 4K gaming, they could probably handle single card 3600x1920 at decent settings, though probably not highest without dropping significantly below 60 FPS. But it leaves room for adding a 2nd card, whereas starting with 270X doesn't. Looks like it only has 1 Crossfire bridge which means you can't add a third card.
Da W - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Good advice. I'll discard option number 1 then, and yes i'm waiting until we see custom coolers on the 290 series before i make a move, probably an MSI one to match my MB. Although that Nvidia cooler is cool looking as hell.....At "3.5K", i find that disabling AA or adjusting just a step below "ultra freaking high details" makes all games playable. By playable i mean above 30FPS.
krumme - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Where is the noise equalization test?It looks like the asus card is around 853% faster than the nearest competitor.
Streetwind - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Ryan, will you be adding the results from the various R7/R9 models tested in the last month or two to Bench eventually? The entire new series is absent so far, as is the GTX 780 Ti. I often use Bench for comparing my current card to potential upgrades, so it would be great to have.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
Yes. GPU14 Bench will be up next week; I need to clean up the DB a bit first.yacoub35 - Wednesday, November 13, 2013 - link
So how come no mention of the 7950 in the conclusion? It's clearly the right choice, as you get 3GB of VRAM in addition to superior performance, and all for a price well under $200.