MSI Radeon R9 270X HAWK Review
Published by Christian Ney on 21.10.13Page:
Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| The Radeon R9 270X HAWK from MSI is a
really nice piece of hardware. It features a very strong power design, a
great cooling solution
and some nice overclocking features. But the card isn't perfect, since it comes
with a very high price tag and MSI could have easily pushed the factory overclocking
further. 100 MHz on the core is good but equipping the card with memory chips
rated at 1'500 MHz but actually clocking them at 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 - GPU Clock - Overclocking features |
- Price
- Memory Clock |
|
| Cooling / Noise Level | + | - | |
| For its Radeon R9 270X HAWK MSI makes use of the same cooler you can find on the GeForce GTX 770 Lightning and 760 HAWK. This Twin Frozr IV Advanced is powerful, the cooling performance is great, the build quality is very good and it is extremely silent under load conditions, almost noiseless. In idle it is. | - Cooling performance
- Noise levels |
||
| Performance | + | - | |
| The Radeon R9 270X HAWK is a fast card.
In the games tested it is on average 6.7 % faster than a
Radeon R9 270X with reference clocks , 14 % faster than a reference clocked
Radeon HD 7870 and as fast as a GeForce GTX 760. A closer look at power consumption shows, that our test system, equipped with the HAWK, burns 45 Watts under idle conditions and 257 Watts under load. In idle that's a very good result but under load we think the power consumption is a bit high compared to stock clocked R9 270X and HD 7870. The HAWK draws as much as a reference GTX 680 for example and there is a 20% performance gap between the two cards. |
- Performance | - Performance/Watt
- Power consumption under load |
|
| Recommendation / Price | + | - | |
| The Radeon R9 270X prices are much better than last
week. At the time of the review, the HAWK can be found with a starting
price of 191 Euro and the cheapest offer for a R9 270X starts at 165
Euros excluding shipping costs accross the EU. Its price is good and bad at the same time. On one side the HAWK costs as much as the DirectCU II Top, for example, is faster, better and more silent. It also costs as much as the cheapest GTX 760 that offers same performance. On the other side we think 26 Euro is a bit too much on top even for what you get. Furthermore the Rx 200 series is not currently part of the Never Settle Forever program. The graphics card itself is a beast but unfortunately manufacturers can't do magic with a two years old chip. Especially when its new release doesn't come with the game bundle the old release still comes with. All things considered, we would recommend R9 270X HAWK, or any other R9 270X for that matter, only if you are not interested in the game bundle. If you are interested in the game bundle, you're better off with a custom Radeon HD 7950 that comes with it, offers better or same performance and is cheaper or as expensive. |
- Gaming
- Overclocking |
- Price | |
| We gave the Radeon R9 270X HAWK from MSI 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
| Navigate through the articles | |
ASUS Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II Top Review |
Gigabyte Radeon R9 270X OC Review
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