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), it has a significant 16 percent higher memory clock speed 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.



Today, we are reviewing the MSI Radeon R7 270X HAWK, which is the company's R7 270X SKU for overclockers. It comes with voltage control, voltage measurement points, and a 90 MHz overclock on the GPU. Another highlight is the cooler: It uses the same base as the R9 280X, but comes with slightly smaller fans.

Currently, the MSI R7 270X HAWK is available online for $230, a $30 price increase over the Radeon R9 270X reference design.

Packaging

Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver CD + documentation
• 2x PCIe power cable
• 3x Voltage measurement cable
• 1x DVI adapter

The Card

MSI's HAWK Series uses a cooler similar to that of the R9 280X GAMING we reviewed recently, but the fans on the HAWK are smaller and the color theme is yellow instead of red. The card's dimensions are 25.5 cm x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. Triple-monitor surround gaming is possible with the card.

The GPU also includes an HDMI sound device. It is HDMI 1.4a compatible, which includes HD audio and Blu-ray 3D movies support.


One CrossFire connector allows you to combine up to two R9 270X cards in a CrossFire configuration.


Pictured above are the front and back, showing the disassembled board. High-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods, etc., please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.