General | + | - | |
The Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II Top from ASUS is a
nice piece of hardware. It features a strong power design and a very good cooling solution. But
the card isn't perfect, it comes with a very high price tag, the bundle
is poor and ASUS could have easily pushed the factory overclocking
further. 70 MHz on the core is cool but equip the card with 1'500 MHz
rated memory chips and clock the memory at only 1'400 MHz makes us cry. Also we have to point out that the Radeon 200 series is not currently part of the Never Settle Forever program. This may change in the future but at the moment you don't get any game for free buying a Radeon 200 series card unless the manufacturer specifies otherwise. |
- Performance
- Cooling - Design - Power Design |
- Price
- Bundle - Factory Overclocking |
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Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
For its Radeon R9 270X DC2T ASUS makes use of the
same cooler as on the Radeon HD 7870 DirectCU II Top V2. This DirectCU II version is a very good cooler, the cooling performance is
great, the build quality is very good and it is extremely silent under load
conditions. Furthermore in idle the cooling system is noiseless, thank
god there's no CoolTech fan here. Once inside a good case the chances are good the Radeon R9 270X DC2T unhearable under load too. |
- Cooling performance
- Noise levels |
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Performance | + | - | |
The Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II Top is a fast card.
In the in the tested games the Top is on average 4 % faster than a
reference clocked Radeon R9 270X, 10 % faster than a reference clocked
Radeon HD 7870 and almost as fast as a GeForce GTX 760. A closer look at power consumption shows, that our test system, equipped with the DC2T, burns 48 Watts under idle conditions and 223 Watts under load. Both results are very good, especially under load. |
- Performance/Watt
- Power consumption |
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Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
With a starting price of 222 Euros excluding shipping costs accross the EU, the DirectCU II Top is too expensive. That's about 40 Euros on top of the cheapest R9 270X for example. Obviously such high price is because of recent launch but still, since you can get a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition for only 30 Euros more and the latter is 30 % faster and comes with the Never Settle Forever Bundle. The R9 270X DC2T is going to have a bad time if its selling price remains unchanged. |
- Gaming
- Overclocking |
- Price | |
We gave the Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II Top from ASUS 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
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ASUS Radeon R9 280X DirectCU II Top Review | MSI Radeon R9 270X HAWK Review |
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