ASUS Radeon R9 270 DirectCU II OC Review
Published by Christian Ney on 27.11.13Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| Overall results are quite good on the new ASUS Radeon R9 270 DirectCU II OC graphics card and it is practically the fastest out of the box R9 270 graphics card. The performance is good as it can match the performance of the Radeon R9 270X with just a slight overclock, which by the way can be achieved without any problems. It is definitely a good graphics card but there is always more room for improvement and despite that it has a decent cooler we would prefer it to be a bit more silent. The bundle is OK for a mid-range graphics card, but it unfortunately does not include any games. Currently the price is a bit on the high side so we think it should have been a bit cheaper. |
- Performance - Cooling performance - Design |
- Noise
levels
- Price |
|
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| The R9 270 DirectCU II OC is equipped with a smaller sized DirectCU II cooler - cooling performance is good but could have been improved with better thermal paste. ASUS could have also decided to go with a middle sized cooler that could easily justify a bit higher price tag that the ASUS R9 270 DirectCU II OC currently sells for. It is silent in idle but not noiseless but since it will mostly be in a closed case, noise will not be a big issue, while under load it is in decent margins but we would definitely liked it to be more silent. We would also liked if ASUS picked a different temperature target in the BIOS and raise it for about 10°C to make the card more silent and more attractive. Its close competitor, the MSI R9 270 Gaming series graphics card offers the same performance levels and it is more silent due to its full sized Twin Frozr IV Advanced cooler. | - Cooling performance | - Noise levels | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Thanks to a slight factory overclock, the ASUS R9
270 DirectCU II OC is on average 4% faster than a reference clocked card
in tested games. Compared to previous generation, the R9 270 DC2OC is 4%
faster than the HD 7870 and 25% faster than the HD 7850. When compared to a reference clocked R9 270X, which shares the same chip, but with higher clocks, the R9 270 DC2OC is 4 % slower out of the box and as fast with 75MHz overclock on the GPU side. Since the GPU is the same but with different clocks, we wanted to see how easy will it be to match the R9 270X performance with overclocking. Thanks to a solid design as well as a good non-reference cooler, the overclocking was a stroll in the park. Reaching 75 MHz more on the GPU did not even require any voltage tweaking and the ASUS R9 270 DC2OC was fully stable. We ran Unigine Heaven Extreme with the GPU at 1'050 MHz for six hours and everything went fine. The power consumption is quite high in idle (we recall it is because of ASUS own PCB design) with 53W against 48W obtained with other cards. Under load, the power consumption is good, the R9 270 is the most efficient AMD graphics card we tested so far, scoring the highest performance/watt ratio. The ASUS R9 270 DC2OC is a bit behind due to the factory overclock and higher voltage which makes the card draw 7% more (209W vs 194W) but since the performance also rose (4%), the graphics card keeps a very good performance/watt ratio. |
- Performance - Power consumption under load |
- Performance/Price | |
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| The ASUS R9 270 DirectCU II OC is a good card but unfortunately it comes with a high price tag. The R9 270 is a card with a rather impressive performance/price ratio, something that ASUS' version lost because of its price, which is 20 Euros higher than the currently available cheapest R9 270 graphics card. A price which is unfortunately not justified since there is the R9 270 Gaming graphics card from MSI that offers same performance, better cooling, is also more silent and can be found for 10 Euros less. | - Gaming | - Price | |
| We gave the R9 270 DirectCU II OC from ASUS 4 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X OC Review |
PowerColor Radeon R9 280X TurboDuo OC Review
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