HIS Radeon R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost Review

Conclusion

The AMD Radeon R9 270X began life as an attractively priced mid-range card for 1080p gamers on a relatively tight budget. Given the popularity of 1080p as a gaming resolution, this is an important market segment, so any board partner able to churn out a half decent version of the card will immediately be in a favourable position, as HIS is now.

The overclock HIS applies may not always add up to much performance, but our overclocked testing so far with the R9 270X GPU seems to suggest that the 1,150MHz clock speed it ships the card with is relatively close to its limit (without bolstering the power circuitry), so we can't fault them for that. However, the fact that HIS has gone to the effort of cooling the memory chips and using GDDR5 modules officially rated for 6GHz seems silly given that they've then left them running at 5.6GHz. Granted, overclocking them yourself is far from difficult, but even so we'd like to have seen some effort here – Battlefield 4, for example, appears to benefit greatly from speedier memory.


The card's cooler is also excellent – it kept the GPU running wonderfully cool and we barely ever heard it over the rest of our hardware. It could almost be considered overkill given that it extends the cards length and height beyond the PCB, but most enclosures should still house it comfortably.

In the end then, this version of the HIS R9 270X throws up few surprises. It's a little bit faster than the stock card and also cooler and quieter (although on these latter points it really does impress). Since it appears to be out of stock everywhere at the moment, it's silly to recommend, but the R9 270X IceQ X2 Boost (the non-Turbo version) is exactly the same but ships with reference clock speeds. Therefore, given that this card appears to offer no extra overclocking potential over stock cards, the non-Turbo version could well be overclocked to the same frequencies as this Turbo one, although this can't be guaranteed. Either way, if you're looking for a cost-effective solution to play modern games at high settings on a 1080p panel, it will serve you very well.