Overclocking

There's no ability to adjust the PowerColor R9 270's voltage, but we began our overclocking efforts by increasing the power limit to the maximum permitted: 120 percent.

We were able to push the core clock up to 1,080MHz before things became unstable. This is a 13 percent increase over PowerColor's core speed but a more impressive 17 percent over the AMD reference clock for the GPU. It's also 30MHz higher than the stock speed R9 270X, and as the graphs show the R9 270 becomes more powerful as a result, since clock speed is the only performance factor where they differ. We were able to push the same GPU to 1,190MHz on the R9 270X, however, so unsurprisingly the single PCI-E power connection of the R9 270 does limit its overclocks by comparison.

As for the memory clock speed, we were only able to reach 1.525GHz (6.1GHz effective). This is still a healthy 9 percent boost, but we did reach higher speeds with the memory on our R9 270X.