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), it has a significant 16 percent higher memory clock speed 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.



Today, we are reviewing the MSI Radeon R7 270X HAWK, which is the company's R7 270X SKU for overclockers. It comes with voltage control, voltage measurement points, and a 90 MHz overclock on the GPU. Another highlight is the cooler: It uses the same base as the R9 280X, but comes with slightly smaller fans.

Currently, the MSI R7 270X HAWK is available online for $230, a $30 price increase over the Radeon R9 270X reference design.