ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II OC 2 GB Video Card Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-08-04

The ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II VGA card shares the hardware with the more expensive 270X variant, but has lower stock clocks; from our experiences regarding overclocking with this card, we could say that it can easy surpass the R9 270X clocks or ever surpass it. Those who search the best bang for the buck VGA cards and won’t game on higher resolutions than Full-HD should put this card on their short list.

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Introduction

 

At first we would like to thank AMD Canada for offering a sample of the ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II OC 2GB video card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About ASUS:

 

“ASUS takes its name from Pegasus, the winged horse in Greek mythology that symbolizes wisdom and knowledge. ASUS embodies the strength, purity, and adventurous spirit of this fantastic creature, and soars to new heights with each new product it creates.

 

Taiwan’s Information Technology industry has grown enormously over the last few decades and the country is now a dominant force in the global market. ASUS has long been at the forefront of this growth and while the company started life as a humble motherboard manufacturer with just a handful of employees, it is now the leading technology company in Taiwan with over 12,500 employees worldwide. ASUS makes products in almost every area of Information Technology too, including PC components, peripherals, notebooks, tablets, servers and smartphones.

 

Innovation is key to the success of ASUS. Having unveiled the PadFone to a rapturous audience at Computex 2011, this year, ASUS chairman Jonney Shih raised the bar once more by announcing the TAICHI™ and Transformer Book dual-purpose ultraportables.

 

ASUS TAICHI™ is an Ultrabook™ with a unique double-sided multi-touch display that allows it to switch between a tablet and notebook in an instant, simply by lifting its lid. Transformer Book is a convertible Ultrabook that is both a notebook with hard drive and storage and a multi-touch SSD tablet, thanks to its backlit keyboard dock.

 

Together with its exciting new range of Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets, ASUS has a dazzling array of innovative products that will surpass users’ imaginations as the world enters a new era of cloud computing.

 

This visionary approach is the reason ASUS is able to bring high-quality innovation and design to all, and the reason for its widespread acclaim. ASUS products won 4,256 international awards and accolades in 2013 – that’s over 11 a day, every day. ASUS has consistently achieved significant year-on-year growth in terms of consumer notebook units shipped too, and closed 2011 on a high with revenues hitting US$11.9 billion.”

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Comment from Casecutter @ 2014/08/14
Great review! Nice detail in pictures and overview, always like to see what you’d be getting. While nice to see this level of card ran on a i5 system. Sure an i7 (Hyper Threading) doesn’t make a huge difference, it’s just nice for mainstream folks builds running mainstream cards. Not sure I find the noise result all that beneficial as you don’t state the idle or gameplay dBA, so not sure if that translates to useful information. Perhaps provide that you never notice the fan speed above XXX. Have a look a the text in the noise it says “GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the HIS iTurbo utility”.

Great that you give the B-M results with varying settings and resolutions, doing so does shows how perhaps spending more for a card can prove advantageous, while might not depending on titles someone plays. Could say the title list is a little Nvidia intrinsic, and some not all that relevant. Would like to see BF4, Assassin's Creed, and COH2. Honestly I was surprised of the 270 in many cases at 1080p the gap when the AA levels where brought up didn’t skew super out of bounds. I would’ve though the processing of the GTX 760 should’ve really been an advantage.

One thing folks should be made thoroughly conscious of… is the Inno3D GeForce GTX 760 iChill HerculeZ 3000 Edition, is no slouch of a card it’s a 3-slot, 3-fan beast. OC’d at 1059Mhz, a Boost clock of 1124 Mhz (9%), while the memory is a little tweaked as well at 6210 Mhz. It’s is the Top-Shelf purchase for the utmost mainstream buyer, calling for 50% more cash (verse the Asus) to step-up to a card of such “class”. Be mindful this modestly OC (5-6%) Asus 270, which is ranked two entire reductions in “class” for both price and power (1x 6-pin); to even “stay close” to such a card is a huge accomplishment. An R9 270 is more often reliable step up from “entry” into mainstream. Would’ve like to have seen a GTX750 Ti in the results, because that’s what Nvidia has in the mix as more the rival to that R9 270.

I would’ve enjoyed seeing the Asus B-M with the OC of 1100Mhz and 6000mhz, that’s where the bang-for-buck is truly the narrative. The other would’ve been power numbers, nothing extra ordinary just even a kill-o-watt showing idle, while gaming of one or two titles (even OC’d), and perhaps run in “long-idle monitor-off state” to see what AMD’s Zerocore delivers.

Edit: Have been waiting for the forums account to get validated to post this. I see you have the Gigabyte 750Ti Ultra Durable BLACK review up now that should make a great assessment..
Comment from Stefan Mileschin @ 2014/08/15
I would like to respond to the request regarding BF4 & Co benchmarks: I do not use such games since they do not offer official benchmarking tools and I find user-made time-demos non-conclusive.

Also, re-benching the card for over 23 hours in Overclocking mode seems a little bit inconclusive also because there is no guarantee that all retails cards get to the same frequencies.
Comment from Casecutter @ 2014/08/15
True and reasonable Thanks'
Cc

 

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