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 ASUS. Their R9 270X Direct CU II TOP brings with it the company's dual-fan thermal solution and a large overclock out of the box reaching 1120 MHz on GPU. Memory is not overclocked and remains at 1400 MHz.

ASUS is charging a $10 premium, a price increase that doesn't seem unreasonable, over the reference design for the overclock out of the box and their cooler.