AMD Radeon R9 270 Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,308 words · ~6 min read
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Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to
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win at a price you'll like click now to learn
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more welcome to my unboxing and review of a product that I can't figure out the
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reason for its existence this is the r9270 from AMD in particular we have the
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MSI gaming Edition with their twin frozer cooler their military spec
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military class design so that means very robust components great for overclocking
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and running cool and Lasting a long time and all that stuff as well as well
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that's pretty much it the cooler and the better designed PCB are kind of the
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benefits of a gaming class card from MSI all right so why can't I figure out why
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it exists well because it's pretty similar to the 270x so it comes with a
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two Molex to single PCIe six pin adapter it's 150 watt TDP card so you only need
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a single six connector you've got some user guide and Driver discs and all that
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don't worry about it all right so the graphics card itself has a fully
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featured core which means 1,280 stream processors a 256-bit memory
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interface and the only real difference between this and its bigger brother the
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270x is the slightly lower frequency on
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the GPU core so a reference to70 would
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be clocked at around 925 MHz whereas a reference 270x is going to be at 1.05
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GHz now with that said this MSI one comes clocked at 975 MHz
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anyway so the performance is very very
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close and it costs about 10% less now all of the usual features with the
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exception of true audio are supported direct x1.2 their new mantle API which
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is going to have support in Battlefield 4 and Star Citizen and some upcoming
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games coming soon although we've yet to find out how much of a performance
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difference that makes it do have support for their new easi Affinity so you can
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plug three displays into whichever three connections you want and you can even
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use a DisplayPort Hub to connect up to six displays to this individual card
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although for a 2 gig card with this kind of power I wouldn't really recommend
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running ifinity 1080P and expecting to play the latest games at Ultra details
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the performance is going to be everything for this now our usual thing
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is we take the cards oh yeah I guess we should do a bit of a tour of the cards
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so we've got MSI 100 mm propeller blade fans so they have the uh coating on the
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edges they spin backwards in order to prevent dust buildup and all that noise
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speaking of noise it's very very very quiet then we've got some heat pipes
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down here so we've got two heat pipes leading out to a pretty large actually
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aluminum finay so you can see that there is a bit of a p PCB extension right here
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so it's actually longer than the PCB itself but for good reason because
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they've actually got more cooling potential there they've also got their
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usual rigidity enhancing piece right here that actually does help the card
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seg and droop lest we've got a crossfire connector supporting up to two-way
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Crossfire configurations and a gorgeous matte black PCB on the back we've also
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got a PC Express 3.0 16x interface and
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the aforementioned six pin PCI Express plug so you will be yeah that's pretty
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much it okay so it comes down to Performance and price so the price is
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better than a 270x and the performance once we overclocked this thing we got
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this thing just absolutely rocking because it's a non-reference card it
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does overclock and it is cool better than our reference 270x and we actually
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got pretty much the same performance with Max overclocks on this card and the
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other one so we're looking at something like this going holy crap well this
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thing is fantastic it's basically just cheaper so this is why I'm saying I the
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the whole I don't know why it exists thing because AMD is basically undercutting the 270x by bringing this
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card to us only a couple weeks later and it's performed great so without further
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Ado I'm going to hand things off to slick and he can let you guys know that
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the performance is awesome with actual graphs oh whoa hey hold on okay I'm back
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no I missed something okay so they've got their zero core technology which
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basically turns off the GPU when your system goes to sleep and the display
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goes off so you can actually save a lot of power that way not full sleep display
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off sleep just to be clear and I wanted to talk a little bit about our testing
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methodology for our graphics cards we overclock every card so the cold hard
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truth is yes designs like this will do better than reference designs a lot of
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the time but them's the brakes I guess that is a lesson about buying
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non-reference cards cards versus buying reference cards if you want the absolute
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maximum performance when you're overclocking you can see all of our overclocking settings in the graph and
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chart that is actually linked below the video description so you can see exactly
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what we're doing and if you want to see stock benchmarks there are of course a
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hundred other sites that'll have stock benchmarks for this card so feel free to
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go and check those ones out but we're showing overclock numbers in all of our
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games at 1080p which is what this card is designed for 1080p Sweet Spot
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performance and now off to Luke slick
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whatever his name is the first thing to notice is that in our overclocked
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benchmarks the 270 beats out the 270x
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just like in our overclocked benchmarks how the 290 beat out the 290x although
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in this situation it's slightly different because our 270 has an
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aftermarket cooler where our 270x did not so there's a slight difference there
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for overclocking with this card it was actually quite simple you take all the
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sliders to the very end click apply and
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you're done it's completely stable we had a core clock of 1050 the entire time
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no matter what I threw at it it was completely stable and this was awesomely
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boring it was awesome because you get to just take all the sliders and put them
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at the end which is always kind of fun but then it was boring because it just
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kind of worked and had no issue whatsoever and there was no fine-tuning
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or anything like that I was just put them all at the end and you're good to go it only got to 63° and the fan speed
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only went up to 27% on the heaviest load I put it on so it seems like there might
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be some extra power there that it could harness but it just isn't other than
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that it performs really well and as lus said I'm not entirely sure sure why it
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exists but I'm happy it's here so that's about it if you like the video like the
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video If you dislike the video dislike the video and in the comments below what
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do you think about AMD's new naming scheme and all these different products that they're releasing with very similar
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but different names and as always subscribe to lus Tech tips