Sapphire announces its first Radeon R9 270 (non-X) graphics card, with the company's lightweight Dual-X cooling solution, which combines a compact heat-pipe fed aluminium fin stack, with a pair of 70 mm spinners. The card sticks to AMD reference clock speeds of up to 925 MHz core, 5.60 GHz memory, and draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector. An OC variant is also in the pipeline, with a 10 percent OC. Based on the 28 nm "Curacao" silicon, the R9 270 features 1,280 stream processors, 80 TMUs, 32 ROPs, and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface, holding 2 GB of memory. At its sub-$150 price, it's designed to go up against the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost.