Radeon R9 270X 

With a price of $210, the card is just $10 more expensive than the cheapest R9 270X on the market.

In terms of pricing the card is very competitive, it is available online for $200, which means there is no price increase at all for higher clocks and cooler.

The higher MSRP could also give board partners more room to release their custom designs without any large price increases.

In idle it's pretty quiet, but not as quiet as it should be, given what we've seen from other cards in its price and performance range.

When looking at pricing, we immediately see that the card is significantly more expensive than HD 7870 and HD 7850, even with the performance gains taken into account.

For $250, you can get a GTX 760, which is faster, and the HD 7950 with similar performance is currently available for $205.

Overall the card is a good choice if you are looking to play games at full HD, with good details and don't have a lot of money to spend.

We've seen excellent noise levels from previous MSI GAMING series cards, and the R9 270X GAMING is no exception here.

A CHiL CHL8225G is used by AMD, a very common and popular voltage controller that offers software voltage control and monitoring, and is well supported by most software.

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.

It would have been nice of ASUS to also include a memory overclock to help with performance, and while the memory chips are not amazing overclockers, they could certainly handle a few MHz extra.

You can also see a memory pad here; it cools some of the memory chips (not all).

During gaming we see a bit higher numbers, which is as expected, because the card is overclocked out of the box.

Power draw is also a bit higher while gaming, which is as expected since the card is overclocked out of the box.

The game's unique combat system gives you significant freedom over your movement, the actions you take, and your counter-attacks—individual body parts can also be targeted.