Gadgetory

Corsairs Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you like click now to learn more welcome to my unboxing and review of a product that I can't figure out the reason for its existence this is the r9 270 from AMD in particular we have the MSI gaming Edition with their twin frozer cooler their military spec military class design so that means very robust components great for overclocking and running cool and lasting a long time and all that stuff as well as well that's pretty much it the cooler and the better designed PCB are kind of the benefits of a gaming class card from MSI alright so why can't I figure out why it exists well because it's pretty similar to the 270 X so it comes with a do 2 molex 2 single PCIe 6 pin adapter it's 150 watt TDP card so you only need a single 6 pin connector you've got some user guidance driver disks and all that don't worry about it alright so the graphics card itself has a fully featured core which means 1280 stream processors a 256-bit memory interface and the only real difference between this and its bigger brother the 270x is the slightly lower frequency on the GPU core so a reference 270 would be clocked at around 925 megahertz whereas a reference 270 X is going to be at 1.05 gigahertz now with that said this msi one comes clocked at 975 megahertz anyway so the performance is very very close and it costs about 10 percent less now all of the usual features with the exception of trueaudio are supported DirectX 11 point to their new mantle api which is going to have support in battlefield 4 and star citizen and some upcoming games coming soon although we've yet to find out how much of a performance difference that makes it does have support for their new easy Eyefinity so you can plug three displays into whichever three connections you want and you can even use a DisplayPort hub to connect up to six displays to this individual card although for a two gig card with this kind of power I wouldn't really recommend running eyefinity 1080p and expecting to play the latest games at Ultra details the performance is going to be everything for this now our usual thing is we take the cards oh yeah I guess we should do a bit of a tour of the cards so we've got MSI 100 millimeter propeller blade fans so they have the coating on the edges they spin backwards in order to prevent dust buildup and all that noise at speaking of noise it's very very very quiet then we've got some heat pipes down here so we've got two heat pipes leading out to a pretty large actually aluminium thinner right so you can see that there is a bit of a peanut PCB extension right here so it's actually longer than the PCB itself but for good reason because they've actually got more cooling potential there they've also got their usual rigidity enhancing piece right here that actually does help the card sag and droop last we've got a crossfire connector supporting up to two way crossfire configurations and a gorgeous matte black PCB on the back we've also got a PCI Express 3.0 16 X interface and the aforementioned 6 pin PCI Express plug so you will be yeah that's pretty much it ok so it comes down to performance and price so the price is better than a 270 X and the performance once we overclocked this thing we got this thing just absolutely Rocking because it's a non reference card it does overclock and it is cooled better than our reference 270 X and we actually got pretty much the same performance with max overclocks on this card and the other one so we're looking at something like this going holy crap well this thing's fantastic it's basically just cheaper so this is why I'm saying I the hold I don't know why it exists thing because AMD is basically undercutting the 270x by bringing this card to us only a couple weeks later and it's performed great so without further ado I'm going to hand things off to slick and he can let you guys know that the performance is awesome with actual graphs whoa hey hold on ok I'm back now I missed something ok so they've got their zero core technology which basically turns off the GPU when your system goes to sleep and the display goes off so you can actually save a lot of power that way not full sleep display off sleep just to be clear and I wanted to talk a little bit about our testing methodology for our graphics cards we overclocked every card so the cold hard truth is yes designs like this will do better than reference designs a lot of the time but then the breaks I guess is a lesson about buying non-reference cards versus buying reference cards if you want the absolute maximum performance when you're overclocking you can see all of our overclocking settings in the graph and chart that is actually linked below the video description so you can see exactly what we're doing and if you want to see stock benchmarks there are of course 100 other sites that'll have stock benchmarks for this card so feel free to go and check those ones out but we're showing overclocked numbers in all of our games at 1080p which is what this card is designed for 1080p sweet spot performance and now off to loop it's like whatever his name is the first thing to notice is that in our overclocked benchmarks the 270 beats of the 270x just like in our overclocked benchmarks how the 290 beat of the 290 X although in this situation is slightly different because our 270 has an aftermarket cooler where our 270x did not so there's a slight difference there for overclocking with this card o is actually quite simple you take all the sliders to the very end click apply and you're done it's completely stable we had a core clock of 10:50 the entire time no matter what I threw out it was completely stable and this was awesomely boring it was awesome because you get to just take all the sliders and put them up the end which is always kind of fun but then it was boring because it just kind of worked and had no issue whatsoever and there was no fine-tuning or anything like that was just put them all at the end and you're good to go and only got a 63 degrees and the fan speed only went up to 27% on the heaviest load I put it on so it seems like there might be some extra power there that I could harness but it just isn't other than that it performs really well and as Linus said I'm not entirely sure why it exists but I'm happy it's here so that's about it if you liked the video like the video if you just liked the video dislike the video and in the comments below what do you think about AMD's new naming scheme and all these different products that they're releasing with very similar but different names and as always subscribe to Linus tech tips