Radeon R9 270 

Unfortunately we didn't receive a R9 270 reference board from AMD, so we don't have the reference design performance numbers to compare to.

The card is also overclocked out of the box, to 975 MHz, which is a 50 MHz overclock; the reference AMD Radeon R9 270 Non-X uses a 925 MHz clock.

Overclocking on our sample worked well and gained another 10% real-life performance.

The card requires a 6-pin PCI-Express power connector.

During gaming we see almost exactly the same power consumption as the AMD R9 270X reference design, which was kinda expected, because R9 270 Non-X is just a lower clocked R9 270X.

It's good to see that ASUS left some manual OC potential for power users.

The card isn't exactly new, it's basically an R9 270X (with the same amount of shaders), same memory, but lower clock speeds.

Memory doesn't overclock so well, because of the Elpida memory chips used.

Memory isn't overclocked at all, and remains at the default of 1400 MHz.

We see quite high levels in single monitor idle, multi-monitor idle and Blu-ray playback, issues that are common to many AMD cards.

In multi-monitor/Blu-ray AMD cards have notoriously bad power consumption, NVIDIA provides much better results here.

It is faster and cheaper than GTX 660, having about the same price/performance as HD 7870, but it's faster.