Gadgetory

hey you're watching James - since and I'm wearing a very brightly colored shirt which means that we're going to bring you an affordable graphics card review actually those two things really have nothing in common do they either way we're going to check out a graphics card that gives you awesome performance and it doesn't break the budget now it's no secret that I really like MSI I mean I really like MSI if that wasn't obvious behind me so when msi was willing to send me a brand new r9 card that is unreleased i had to jump at the chance to test this card out and see whether or not this is a card that you guys really should spend your hard-earned money on because the graphics card that we're going to look at today is aimed directly at the person who is on a budget I mean you've got the r9 290x you got the 280x you've got the high-end cards that are out there but a lot of people just don't have that kind of money to blow so we're going to take a look at a graphics card today that is aimed right in the middle and that is going to be the r9 270 there it is it's got a dragon on it and everything now a lot of people may be looking at this right now going what gives the 270 is already out what's already out is the 270 X this is the 270 there's no X on it so this is aimed right around where the 7800 series is on the 7000 series and if you want to get really technical this would be right around where the 7850 is today or yesterday now let's go ahead and talk about what it is that we're looking at here this is the r9 270 gaming OC edition by MSI now I really like the gaming line that they've come out with this year 2013 was a year that MSI launched its new gaming line of graphics cards and motherboards and they're aimed at just that the enthusiast gamer now it's a mid-range product it falls right in the middle of their product line and it offers a lot of really unique features that definitely appeal to gamers one thing it does feature that I want to go ahead and mention first because a lot of people have asked about shadow play and how I feel about it but I will tell you that this graphics card right on the back of the box here shows that it comes with the experience it says predator it says experience predator and this is a lot like Nvidia shadowplay where it will record your gaming as it's happening then you can access it later and use it for playback in videos or YouTube videos or whatever you want to do with it so it does feature that now when it comes to the construction it does have solid capacitors and it does have a 18 year gaming life on the solid caps so the caps are rated 18 years or 150 8130 that's pretty big now the gaming edition has a really cool design to it and their logo in their mascot in this whole gaming edition thing obviously is this dragon and it looks really really cool and this is the OSI model as I mentioned and it does have in the gaming app easy tune so you can set it for OSI mode gaming mode or silent mode I don't know anybody who's going to buy this card and not running an OSI mode for performance specs on the card it does have a 975 megahertz clock a 400 megahertz base clock that's what it runs at when it's just idling for hundreds and it has a 256 bit memory bus has 2 gigs of onboard memory and it does have 4 DisplayPort outputs it's got your display port HDMI port dvi-i and DVID it is recommending a 500 watt or greater power supply has to have at least one 6 pin PCI Express connector and it has to be able to supply 75 watts to that 6 pin connector so the bottom line is any reputable power supply company is going to be able to power this card it's not a very hungry card whatsoever I'm going to go ahead and open this thing up we're going to take a look we're going to take a look at what comes in the box inside the package here you have another cardboard box and this is where you're going to have your software your manual and your warranty information and you know a 4-pin molex times 2 to 6 pin and we don't need that and you have your user's guide in your manual and your or your users guide in your software disk I recommend downloading a fresh one off the internet because things are always changing and then you have your DVI port to vga adapter I don't think anyone should be using that let's go ahead and get to what really matters here and that is the cart we've got the card right here in this anti-static bag and it is definitely a liquor you I'm very pleased with the gaming line for MSI from MSI a lot of gaming coolers sometimes just look really over-the-top they're really not very attractive but this looks awesome especially if you're going to the black and red build or maybe an AMD build this is just going to look really really hot you've got this really awesome gaming logo right here with the dragon on it and you've got your dual fans on here that run at a incredibly silent operation I mean they move so much air and it helps that they have this massive heatsink on there that just runs the entire length of the card and in fact it extends out past the back of the card as you can see right here you have your 6 pin PCI Express port plug right here on the top and you do have two aluminium heat pipes built into this it doesn't seem like a lot that there's only two pipes but guys remember this is not an extremely hot chip to begin with this is a refresh of the 7800 Series card you have your PCI Express slot right here that's protected you know by a little cover and then you have a single crossfire plug right here so you can crossfire this with another matching card the overall design of this looks really good it has a matte black PCB on the back it just looks very attractive so considering the fact that the PCB is mostly what you get to look at if you have a window in your system it looks really awesome and then it has an MSI logo right here on the top that you get greeted with if you look into your case with a window so aesthetics this is a very very pleasing card I really like the way that this looks as we mentioned in the Box you do have your four different ports on here your DVI DVID full-sized HDMI and DisplayPort so we've talked enough about the way the card looks we talked about the specs let's go ahead and get right in to the benchmarks because I know that that's what you guys would really care about and I'm serious when I say that the performance of this card legitimately shocked me if you've got a budget that you got to maintain you don't want to miss these benchmarks ok so let's go ahead and talk about some benchmarking numbers here there's going to be a lot of different stuff flashing up on the screen so I just suggest that you pause it to take a look at the benchmarks that you want for our settings here we are running this card overclocked or running at eleven hundred and ten megahertz I was able to achieve more I dialed it back to where I felt the majority of the cards would be able to settle in on an overclock and run incredibly cool temperatures never exceeded 61 degrees Celsius and the fans never exceeded 27% fan speed that is just insane it is super quiet couldn't even hear the thing when I was gaming and I left the side panel open and my headphones off if you want a silent card definitely consider any card in the gaming line the cooler on this thing is just amazing that's all I can say is amazing alright so for our synthetic benchmark we used Unigine Valley benchmark you know I like to use that and we ran it here at 9 and 75 1050 and 11 hundred and 10 megahertz she can get an idea of how its scaled when overclocking we actually saw the biggest improvement going from 1050 to 1110 so you can see it really jumped up once you opened up to 1100 megahertz and it really liked it there and there was no crashes whatsoever I let it run the loop for over an hour no crashes whatsoever now I'll put up some other games here we got BioShock Infinite Borderlands 2 and tomb raider just want to give you guys an idea of what the performance looks like just pausing on the benchmark you want to take a look at but I know what you guys all care about is battlefield 4 now battlefield 4 as we know as an AMD title and AMD cards love battlefield 4 and this is no exception so how did this mid-range AMD card really perform now I took the lowest averages of all the FPS benchmarks that I did in all the different maps so what you're seeing right here are what the lowest averages are some maps performed really well some maps are more stressful than others so you're taking a look here at what these stressful maps were and what their averages were again as the benchmarks pop up on the screen just pause them at the ones you want to look at well let's go ahead and talk about ultra for a minute here battlefield 4 on ultra on a card that's mid-range like this one was absolutely enjoyable to play on some people might look at the 50 FPS average and say well that's too low or some people might even be saying why is this card performing as well as it is we know what maybe it's because it really likes the overclock maybe ms:i just put together a really awesome mid-range cart and maybe AMD is just really starting to bring it to the table and not only going after the high-end crown like it is with the 290x this might be the year where mid-range AMD cards take the crown as well because these numbers guys they shocked me they shocked me as much as they are shocking you right now I'm sure and I just couldn't believe it they the game was butter smooth once you go through and apply some of the fixes that I've done other videos on to the registry and whatnot definitely check those up the game was butter smooth I was able to not worry about spikes all over the place because the average frames per second that you're seeing here truly were average they were very very level you'd see some spikes and some dips but the bottom line is it wasn't very noticeable this screen latency or the the frame latency was according to MSI Afterburner was very very steady you weren't seeing these crazy times going all over the place the frame latency was very level so the card is delivering you frames on a consistent basis and we need to break out of that concept of frames per second and care more about the frame latency or the time it takes to render that frame because you could have 50 frames per second but if the first half of that delivered you the first half of that second delivered you 40 of those 50 frames per second your eye is going to perceive that as being very stuttery in choppy gameplay so the card delivered very smooth graphics guys if you are looking for a mid-range graphics card that's not going to break the bank it's quiet its efficient and it's just giving you an amazing bang for the buck or price to performance ratio you've got to consider the r9 270 it literally shocked me and you guys know that I'm a graphic snob I've always used the high-end cards and I'm still shopping right now for what high-end card I want to put in this rig and really show off to the world saying this is the card that J's 2 cents is using and this just turned my world upside down because if the 270 is performing like this I can't wait to experience what the higher-end cards are really bringing to the table from AMD I've said it before I think this might be the year of AMD this card only proves it guys I love MSI and it's a brand I have spent a lot of money on out of my own pocket and this r9 270 gaming edition card if you're wondering if I'm giving this away or if you're wondering if MSI is taking it back I got news for you it's going in my second rig that I'm building right now and you'll have to pry this from my cold dead hands and even then you're not getting it don't even try it the dragon will get you it'll eat you I swear to God matches you and one that feels nice Trey's got the right way gotta write something new