Overclocking

Our software of choice for overclocking AMD cards is MSI Afterburner, so we fired it up and began by increasing the card's power limit to 120 percent, the maximum allowed. Sadly, there was no option to alter the card's voltages, even when we attempted to force it through Afterburner.

Even with the increased power threshold and the chunky cooler, we found that the HIS card (or at least our sample) had little left to give. We were only able to add an extra 40MHz onto the core clock for a final speed of 1,180MHz, which is an overclock of just 3.5 percent. It's also 10MHz less than what we saw with the original R9 270X.

As for the memory, we took this from 5.6GHz to 6.3GHz, which is a much more pleasing overclock of 12.5 percent. This again suggests that HIS could easily ship the card with a factory overclock here. Once again, this is actually a little less than we were able to push the memory to on the reference R9 270X, where it reached 6.4GHz.

The results of our overclocking can be seen in the graphs below.