Important: All testing for this review was done with an updated BIOS provided by MSI. It can be found here.

AMD's new Radeon R9 270X is essentially a rebranded HD 7870 GHz Edition running higher clock speeds, but with the same features otherwise. MSI has taken this proven concept and slapped their latest TwinFrozr IV cooler onto it, overclocking the card by an extra 90 MHz. As result, we see the R9 270 HAWK 4% faster than the reference R9 270X, which let the card beat the HD 7950 by 2%. Compared to NVIDIA's offerings, we see the card a tiny bit slower than the GTX 660 Ti (-1%) and a few percent behind the GTX 760 (-7%). It would have been nice if MSI had also overclocked the memory chips for an extra performance boost. Our manual overclocking tests show that this is certainly possible.
I really like the thermal solution on the MSI R9 270X HAWK. It is essentially the same cooler as on the R9 280X GAMING, but with slightly smaller fans, which means the cooler has lots of power to spare. For you, this results in absolutely the lowest noise levels at still comfortable temperatures. I can not stress how quiet this card is enough. When installed in a case that has any other actively cooled components, you won't hear the card from the outside, no matter whether you are being productive or gaming heavily. This is the quietest AMD-based card I've seen in a long time—good job MSI! .. and thanks for the nice backplate!
Overclocking on our sample worked well and reached the levels typical for HD 7870 cards. Memory overclocking worked just as well and reached HD 7870 levels, too, even though the card uses Elpida memory, which is known to clock lower than Samsung or SK Hynix. MSI added a voltage controller that supports voltage control on their card, and while it's not yet supported in any OC software, its support should only be a matter of time. The included dual BIOS and voltage measurement points will make serious overclocking easier too.
MSI's R9 270X HAWK is now available online for $230, which is a $30 price premium over the reference design and seems a bit high to me. For $250, you can get a GTX 760, which is faster, and the HD 7950 with similar performance is currently available for $205. That said, the R9 270X HAWK comes with dual BIOS and voltage measurement points, but both of those are only useful to a smaller group of users. So, personally, I'd say $210-215 is a more realistic price point for this card.