AMD Radeon R9 270X Pro Reviews

If you're looking to spend around the $200 mark, it's fairly safe to say that this is more than likely what you are going to be looking at. The only other question we have now is what happens if you want to spend more? Well, keep an eye out for a review on the new Radeon R9 280X 3GB soon.

At the end of the day the ‘new’ AMD Radeon R9 270X behaves and performs pretty much how the ‘old’ AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz edition cards did. They are essentially the same cards, so that was expected and predicted by many in the gaming community. The Sapphire Toxic R9 270X is a great example of a fully decked out Radeon R9 270X and shows the cards full potential. At $239 you are getting all the bells and whistles and an epic video card that performs great, runs cool and is nearly silent. Sapphire did a great job on the Toxic R9 270X 2GB video card. The only issue that we can see with any Radeon R9 270X cards in $239 price range is that for $249 you are starting to get into the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760cards and they do perform better. If you aren’t brand loyal, you have a tough choice to make as you can go with a top-of-the-line Radeon R9 270X or a GeForce GTX 760 that is likely based off the reference design. The Sapphire Toxic R9 270X is one of those cards that have you purchasing a custom designed video card with less performance in order to have the low temperatures and silent operation.

AMD's Radeon R9 280X is a Radeon 7900-class of card now invested with a new name. Roughly analogous to the HD 7970 GHz Edition in performance, representing the best of the current generation, the prominent feature is the $299 (£230) price, which is (currently) substantially lower than the perf-equivalent GeForce GTX 770 from Nvidia. The new Radeon is powerful enough to play most modern games at a 2,560x1,440 resolution allied to high image quality, and the 3GB framebuffer is ideally suited to running Battlefield 4 at maximum settings. Moving on, the $199 (£150) Radeon R9 270X can legitimately be thought of as an overclocked Radeon HD 7870. The underlying architecture enables decent performance at the usual 1,920x1,080 setting. Nvidia's GTX 760 (£180+) is a little quicker in our benchmarks, intimating that AMD has priced the R9 270X just right. The Radeon R7 260X, meanwhile, is a card suitable for 1,920x1,080 gaming with medium/high image settings in tow. A faster variant of extant Radeon HD 7790 and competitively priced against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 Ti/Boost cards, AMD ensures it has a strong presence at almost all pricing levels. Don't be confused by the new names; these are certainly not true next-generation cards. AMD's using a three-pronged attack of new naming, frequency-modified architecture, and keener pricing to invigorate the mainstream graphics card market for its roster of board partners. The real winner out of this is you, the buyer, because there's simply more in-game performance for every pound spent. Finally, we believe that AMD's Radeon R9 280X, 270X, and R7 260X set new price-to-performance benchmarks and can therefore be recommended, even if, as we've mentioned ad nauseam, the technology is rehashed. Nvidia is likely to counter with a round of price cutting, one would assume, thus making the graphics decision for the next PC upgrade or build even more interesting.

AMD’s Radeon R9 270X is a good performer in the $200 range, managing to essentially tie (or at least keep close pace with) Nvidia’s recent GeForce GTX 760, which, at this writing, was priced at $50 more. It also does this with the same rated power draw (180 watts) under load as Nvidia’s comparable card, while the Radeon R9 280X uses a bit more juice under load than its Nvidia nemesis (the GeForce GTX 770) does. Like the Radeon R9 280X, though, the Radeon R9 270X lacks AMD’s TrueAudio tech, and its specs make it feel more like a tweaked last-generation card than anything truly “new.” But it’s also quiet under load, which makes it a better fit for a quiet PC than the overclocked Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X we also tested. So long as prices remain close to what they were when we wrote this, the Radeon R9 270X will remain an easy pick over Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 760. But, seemingly, it would be inevitable for Nvidia, at some point, to drop the price of the GeForce GTX 760 by $30 or $40 to make it more competitive. If that happens, the Nvidia card will still be a great choice in this price range. Either card should serve 1080p gamers well. Both ran all of our tests at that resolution and high detail settings with smooth frame rates. And apart from the absolute most demanding of today’s games, these cards should give you a fair bit of overhead to play the titles to come in 2014 at high settings, as well.

There is very little new about the technology behind the R9 and R7 series of graphics cards. But the price drops alone would be a huge story even if AMD wasn't also rebranding everything to a new naming scheme at the same time. The R9 280X is clearly and without question the best graphics card for $299 and the same is clear for the R9 270X at $199. NVIDIA has no option today that is currently priced to compete with the performance these two cards can now flaunt. AMD is definitely going to get some attention with this release. The R7 260X is just fine and is competitive against the likes of the GTX 650 Ti Boost but loses the performance battle more than it wins it, leaving me much less impressed with the positioning AMD has put it in. At this point I would normally give a product with this much praise our highest awards but there is one issue that prevents me from doing so. The ugly words that AMD hates: frame pacing. AMD still has some work to do to match the multi-GPU scaling capabilities of NVIDIA's GeForce line especially in the fields of Eyefinity and 4K gaming. Single monitor issues have been mostly addressed and once AMD's driver team can release an update for single large surface resolutions then the products being showcased today are going to burst into the spotlight again. As it stands today though, if you know you are a single GPU gamer, or have no plans to go beyond a single panel display configuration, the Radeon R9 280X and R9 270X are the best GPU options I can point you to.

Getting to the results we find that on average the Radeon R9 270X was 6% faster than the Radeon HD 7870, since its core is overclocked by 5% with 17% faster memory this makes sense. The Radeon R7 260X did slightly better when compared to its rebadged part the Radeon HD 7790 as it was on average 9% faster. That said the core was clocked 10% higher with an 8% faster memory frequency. Compared to Nvidia’s offerings, the Radeon R9 270X faces the GeForce GTX 660 ($200), the R9 270X will be around $20 more than most GTX 660 cards. Still the Radeon R9 270X was on average 18% faster. Then we have the Radeon R7 260X which is said to cost $140, placing it in direct competition with the GeForce GTX 650 Ti, a card that is ~10% slower. While this does help to strengthen AMD’s position against Nvidia’s in the sub-$200 market we expect Nvidia to cut prices of competing cards next month. Finally, we have the issue of the new naming scheme which normally we wouldn’t get too caught up with, except for the fact that AMD thought it wise to implement a radically different naming scheme on a run of rebadging. With the absence of the R9 290X the most significant change that has come with the new RX 200 series thus far is the naming scheme. Of course, we still have the Mantle API to explore but with limited information available and Battlefield 4 still yet to be released we don’t have much to go on just yet.

Functionally, AMD's Radeon R9 270X does not bring anything new to the table. It's basically an overclocked Radeon HD 7870 with a new AMD reference cooler. But the card delivers good performance matching that of the HD 7950, which is effectively a one-tier increase over the previous generation. Compared to NVIDIA's lineup, we find it performing right between NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 660 and GTX 660 Ti, and 12% behind the recently released GTX 760. When choosing between the R9 270X and the HD 7950, which can now be had for as low as $210, consider memory: The HD 7950 with its 3 GB of memory meets the recommended system requirements of "Battlefield 4" and the 2 GB R9 270X doesn't. AMD's new cooler design, while looking pretty, doesn't really impress with its cooling capabilities. It runs relatively hot (not too hot) and has to do so with quite a lot of fan noise to achieve those temperatures. This leads me to the conclusion that the thermal solution is simply underpowered, which doesn't have me worry for the whole product line because most board partners will probably use existing HD 7870 cooler designs. Doing so should be easy given the high efficiency of the R9 270X. Power consumption is very good, especially in gaming. My only complaint is that 2D multi-monitor and Blu-ray playback is still running at the same inefficient levels we've seen from AMD for the last couple years, while NVIDIA's cards have improved drastically by consuming less than half the power of comparable AMD cards in those states.

While true enthusiasts will roll their eyes at the R9 270X’s performance in comparison to the R9 280X, there’s a whole lot to like here. If you are a budget-minded gamer or simply looking for that perfect HTPC solution, this will likely be the card for you. Its 1080P performance is excellent, it is relatively efficient, HDTV compatibility on Radeon cards has always been stellar and AMD’s pricing has everything else beat clean. Those are all key components which allow the R9 270X to become the current leader in a highly competitive $199 market.