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 PowerColor. Their R9 270X PCS+ comes with a completely new cooler design and the PCB has seen some changes, too. With a core clock of 1100 MHz, the GPU overclock isn't as large as on other cards, but the 25 MHz memory OC will help with performance. Also included in the package is a portable power bank to recharge your phone or tablet on the go. The best part? All this comes at reference design pricing of just $200.