AMD Radeon R9 270X Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,497 words · ~7 min read
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the Corsair carbide air 540 High a flow Cube case is great for air cooling or
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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more welcome
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to my unboxing and performance review of the Radeon
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r9270x it's a $200 GPU meaning it's at
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the top end of that best bang for the buck $100 to $200 price range and if
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you're familiar with the 7870 GHz Edition this card is going to look
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pretty familiar to you so it's clocked at 1.05 GHz Max on the core and that
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relates to their new powertune technology so when they say Max clocks
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the way powertune works is much like NVIDIA's GPU Boost 2.0 where it factors
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in not only the clock speed the voltage
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and the power limits of the card but also temperature so it's able to use all
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four of those data points to get the most performance possible out of the
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card at any given time when you're overclocking pretty much the best thing
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to do is turn up the maximum clock speed turn up your available power limit and
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then the card will pretty much do the rest for you you can't do much with the temperature limits because they ship at
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their maximum recommended temperatures from AMD at this time now the way that
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the fan works with respect to temperature is instead of ramping up and
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ramping down quite sharply theyve made things much more gradual so it should be
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a less noticeable change in sound meaning that the card will be less
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obnoxious to the ear when you're opening up games or closing them next up is the
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2 gig frame buffer this is the same as the 770 GHz Edition but unlike the older
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card it is also available in a 4 gig configuration for a few more bucks this
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might be relevant to you if you're gaming at higher resolutions than 1080P
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or for future games however 2 gigs looks
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like it's going to be pretty good for the time being and because this card is
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positioned as a 1080p gaming monster so
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maximum details 1080p um it's up to the individual whether that's useful for you
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or not it has 180 W typical board power
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meaning it needs two PCI Express six pin connectors in order to provide Power and
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it has 1,280 stream processors so that's pretty
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much it for the spec okay it supports direct x1.2 it supports openg o it
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supports mantle so mantle is important it runs on any gcn architecture card
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which this happens to be it's pretty similar to the last gen and pretty
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similar to what's in the Xbox One PS4 and Wii U and mantle is a way for that
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AMD can allow developers to program almost directly to the hardware instead
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of going through an API such as DirectX
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11 well mantle is an API but instead of going through one that is bloated and
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slow and bottlenecks the performance of your system so mantle is going to be
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launching on a couple of different titles Battlefield 4 will be the first
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game with support for mantle and what it basically means is that the Game Dev has
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to code in a completely different path and that sounds crazy that sounds like a
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step backwards to the olden days but it's maybe not because a lot of the devs
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especially if they're crossplatform devs are going to be doing the similar work
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on the next gen consoles anyway so we could be looking at tangible performance
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improvements for AMD cards on games running mantle and for end users it'll
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probably be as simple as something like a drop down menu going from direct X to
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opengl to mantle and just seeing a massive performance Improvement which is
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very very cool now let's do an overall tour of the card here there's a large
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80mm fan in a blower style that's going to exhaust air out the back of the card
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we've also got a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface here at the bottom the two PCI
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Express connectors that I showed you before on the back we find a plain PCB
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with no sort of back plate or anything like that and right here ah yes we find
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more technology two DVI ports HDMI and DisplayPort which might not look that
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interesting but it is so DisplayPort Splitters are now a thing you can run
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three monitors off of that single port and if you don't feel like using display
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port at all and you want to run ifinity you you can use two DVI ports and an
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HDMI port and no adapters with these
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latest generation cards the maximum is 1080p 60 hzz or it might work at 1920 x
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1260 HZ so you can't do you know 3D
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surround or anything like that without implementing a DisplayPort monitor in
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your setup but I still think that's a major step forward in terms of
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compatibility and ease of setup for ifinity and that's not the only way that
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multi-display uh implementation has been simplified some 4K displays these days
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in fact a lot of them are going to require two cables and then they're
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basically going to be two monitors in one and AMD's new implementation on
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these cards is going to allow for automatic Arrangement okay so the
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monitor is going to be able to communicate with the card and say look this is the one that's supposed to be on
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the left this is the one that's supposed to be on the right and detection of these tile displays so that they're
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completely transparent to the end user and you don't even know that there was a
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configuration process that happened they're also launching their Raptor
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gaming app which is more of a co-branding exercise and it allows you
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to interact with your friends across platforms it allows you to launch
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applications without closing down your game it allows you to gives you rewards
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for playing games and finally it optimizes your game settings on your own
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on its own without intervention so it finds other people playing similar games
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to you on similar configs finds out what kind of performance numbers they're
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getting and then allows you to select a slider anywhere from quality to
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Performance depending how you want the game to run and boom it'll do up all the
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details for you in such a way it'll run really well on your system this is to
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compete with of course the GeForce experience from NVIDIA which is similar
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except it doesn't Cloud Source the data from other Gamers zeroc core technology
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is included which basically allows your operating system to power down the GPU
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when it's not doing anything but true audio is not so that is the dedicated
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programmable DSP that's on the 260x and the 290 Series so you will still be
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using your CPU for audio calculations unless you either step up a whole lot or
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step down a significant amount in terms of performance now speaking of
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performance without further Ado I'm handing this video off to Slick to tell
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you guys about the performance of the 270x compared to its competition the
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charts presented before you are just a compilation of all the cards that I've
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been running on these three games over the last little while now you'll notice
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that the r9270x has a running buddy from the
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NVIDIA side but something to notice in this little battle as well is that the
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AMD card is about $50 cheaper at launch
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although this is subject to change obviously one thing that I do notice
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with this price point is that people are really searching for their best bang for
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the buck so this is definitely going to be a card to watch because it is right
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in that price point now if you are someone looking for an AMD card this
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might be the best bank for your buck card out there we'll have to just wait
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and see if you like the video like the video If you dislike the video dislike
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the video and in the comment section below I'd like to have a discussion
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about card rebadging it's kind of a mixed bag all over the internet whether
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people like it or dislike it or what side they're really fighting for their opinions about it and all that kind of
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stuff so I'd like to see what YouTube commenters think about card rebadging
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and as always if you like lonus Tech tips be sure to
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