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 MSI. Their R9 270X GAMING uses the company's well-known TwinFrozr cooling solution. The GAMING series has also impressed us with very low noise in the past, so I have high hopes for this card. MSI has overclocked the R9 270X GAMING to a GPU frequency of 1120 MHz, which is a 70 MHz increase over stock. The card is currently sold online for $220.