Introduction

AMD's new Radeon R9 270X draws its lineage more from the Radeon HD 7800 series than any other. The R9 270X is, for all intents and purposes, identical to the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition which launched at $350, but settled down to around $250, holding on to that price-point quite well, and for quite long. At 1050 MHz, its GPU core clock speed is 5 percent higher, and at 1400 MHz (5.60 GT/s effective), its memory clock speed is a significant 16 percent higher than the HD 7870.

The 28 nm "Pitcairn" silicon on which the Radeon R9 270X is based features 1,280 stream processors based on the Graphics CoreNext micro-architecture, 80 texture memory units (TMUs), 32 raster operations units (ROPs), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface holding 2 GB of memory.



The R9 270X reviewed today comes from HIS. They have increased clock speeds significantly on their R9 270X IceQ X² Turbo Boost, making this one of the highest-clocked R9 270Xs on the market at this time. We also find the HIS signature IceQ X cooler with its two fans on the card.

The card is very competitive in terms of pricing as it is available online for $200, which means there is no price increase at all for higher clocks and the cooler.