HIS R9 270X IceQ x2 Turbo Review

👤by Richard Weatherstone Comments 📅17-11-13
Conclusion
The HIS R9 270X IceQ x2 is a two sided coin if ever the was one. As an overall package it impressed us. While the included accessories were sparse and we are still undecided on the blue PCB, the card itself was very good. It had excellent cooling capabilities, ran very quiet and looks the business. Couple this with one of the fastest factory overclocks available for a R9 270X and HIS would appear to have a winner.

One of our major negatives of this card was it's inability to overclock past that, or even match, the overclock of the reference design, let alone a competitors custom design. While we have no complaints about the card in standard form because it is faster than both, it overclocked like a three legged donkey. Despite our very best efforts, the core appeared to already be overclocked to it's maximum clockspeed because with a measly 60MHz over the 1100MHz 'stock' speed it was 40MHz short of the reference design's overclock. In the greater scheme of things, 40MHz will not break any records so we won't be losing any sleep over it but we felt that the excellent cooling afforded to this design was wasted because of such a small overclock. Generally speaking, enthusiasts will plump for a custom cooled, pre-overclocked GPU because generally speaking, these are speed binned to provide the better silicon. It appears this wasn't the case with our sample.



Other than that the card is very good indeed and comes highly recommended. Were it a capable overclocker too, this card would be Gold worthy but sadly, like the AMD reference design it will have to settle for Silver. We do however feel the card represents very good value for money costing just £150 and while it cannot quite compete with the NVIDIA GTX760 in terms of raw performance figures, it is over £50 cheaper which is quite a saving at this highly competitive level of the market.

To summarise:
With a supremely fast factory overclock, the HIS card performed at the forefront of our benchmarks. Cost, cooling and stock performance were all excellent with only manual overclocking ability found wanting. A great mid-range graphics card worthy of consideration.

Pros
+ Very fast mid-range card
+ Surprisingly quiet
+ Factory overclocked
+ Great looking

Cons
- Poor overclocking results
- Sparse accessories




Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.


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