In a bid to make it a watertight option in the crucial sub-$200 market segment, Sapphire decked up its Radeon R9 270 graphics card in a new factory-overclocked variant, the Boost OC Edition. The card looks identical to the R9 270 Dual-X which the company launched in mid-November, but comes with factory-overclocked speeds of 920 MHz core, 945 MHz PowerTune Boost, and 5.60 GHz (GDDR5-effective) memory; against AMD reference speeds of 900/925/5600 MHz.

The card features a custom-design black PCB by Sapphire, a compact Dual-X cooler that uses a pair of fans to cool a full-fledged aluminium fin-stack heatsink to which heat is conveyed by copper heat pipes; and draws power from a single 6-pin PCIe power connector. 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. Expect this card to retail for around $180.