XFX officially launched its new R9 200 series line-up a couple of days ago and at the press time it consists of the R9 290X, R9 280X and R9 270X graphics cards. Today we want to share our first thoughts about XFX's Double Dissipation R9 270X 1050M Boost 2GB DDR5 Ghost Thermal Dual Mini DisplayPort HDMI dual-DVI or Part No.: R9-270X-CDFC. Since it's a mouthful, we will use short part number in our preview.
AMD’s new Radeon R9 270X is identical to the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition. The card is based on 28nm Pitcairn silicon. It features 1280 stream processors, 80 texture memory units (TMUs), 32 raster operations units (ROPs), and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface backed by 2GB of GDDR5 memory.
XFX decided to refresh its design for the R9 270X by using better dual-slot cooler. The new cooler matches XFX’s new overall look, an all black and very sleek design. We must say that we miss the old Dual Dissipation cooler with the metal bar on top, with the card name prominently displayed. However, the new cooler is quite a looker, too.
The cooler uses two 8.5cm fans, and the heatsink is a little bit bigger compared to the one used on the DD HD 7870 cooler. The new cooler should provide better performance while keeping noise levels at minimum.
The card comes with two mini-DisplayPorts, one standard HDMI and two DVI connectors (one dual -link DVI and one single-link DVI). It needs two 6-pin power cables for normal operation.
If you remember HD 7870 GHz cards were launched in early 2012 with a retail price of around 340 euro, but now you can find them for as little as 160 to 170 euro. It's a great time to be a gamer, as you can pick up an R9 270X for about the same sort of money. The R9-270X-CDFR is listed for 195 euro and suspect the price will be even lower once the cards go on sale.
To show off what the R9-270X-CDFR can do in real life, we gave it a go with Crysis 3 at 1920x1080. Once the game is started and the GPU starts heating up, there are no abrupt fan speed changes.
The temperature did not exceed 71 degrees Celsiusa and that's an excellent result, especially considering the low noise levels. In fact, we had to bend down and open the chassis to actually hear the fans.
The results are decent, too. Crysis 3 with eye candy turned up to eleven can hit about 22fps, which means this card should be able to handle practically any game at 1920x1080, provided you don't max out the details.
So far so good, stay tuned for the full review.
