AMD's R9 270 sits right in the sweet-spot segment for gamers—below $200. This makes the card affordable to almost everyone, while offering good performance at resolutions up to and including full HD. The ASUS R9 270 DC II OC comes overclocked out of the box, which gives it a performance boost. We unfortunately didn't receive a R9 270 reference board from AMD, so we don't have the reference design performance numbers to compare to. The card does very well overall, though. Averaged over all our benchmarks, the card only ends up 5% slower than the R9 270X, 5% faster than the GTX 660 and 5% faster than the HD 7870. It would have been nice to see an overclock on memory, too; the memory chips are specified to run at 1500 MHz, so an overlock would have been easy.
Non-gaming power consumption of the card can't impress. We see quite high levels in single monitor idle, multi-monitor idle, and Blu-ray playback, issues that are common to many AMD cards. During gaming, power consumption is good, making the card a very power efficient choice on the current market.
We've seen the ASUS Direct CU II cooler on many other models from the company before and really like it. On the R9 270, it keeps the card at very lower temperatures slightly above 60°C under load. Fan noise is good, too, but I think it could have been much quieter had ASUS only allowed for slightly higher temperatures. Many users (especially in the West) are looking for quiet cards, while users in the Asian countries favor lower temperatures. While it's bad for a card to run too hot, I think there is no reason one needs to run below 70°C. It will not impact lifetime significantly, especially in a market that's evolving so quickly. Lower noise could, on the other hand, provide a unique selling point for the card.
Overclocking on our sample worked well and netted another 10% real-life performance; it's good to see that ASUS included some manual OC potential for power users, though memory doesn't overclock so well because of the Elpida memory chips used. Chips from Samsung or Hynix generally overclock much better.
With a retail price of $185, the card is just $5 more expensive than the AMD reference design. A price increase that's very reasonable for the overclock out of the box and the improved cooler. This then makes the ASUS R9 270 DC II OC a very cost effective option in the sub-$200 segment. It is faster and cheaper than the GTX 660 and has about the same price/performance ratio as the HD 7870, but is faster. The previous generation HD 7850 is 20% slower (which is quite a lot), but offers slightly better bang for the buck. Our current performance per dollar leader, the NVIDIA GTX 650 Ti Boost, is clearly a more cost-effective option, but also 15% slower.