The PowerColor 270X PCS+ Review

We received a PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ nearly two weeks ago from PowerColor .  It is available at Newegg for $199, and we have been pitting it against the less expensive GTX 660 ($179) and against the more expensive GTX 760 ($249).  The R9 270X is generally priced at $199 and it replaces the similarly-performing HD 7870 which is discontinued and often discounted.  The GTX 660 Ti at $199 would be a better match in performance for the R9 270X over the GTX 660, but it has been EOL’d by Nvidia and we are only benching current video cards for this evaluation.

The GTX 760 is Nvidia’s $249 video card that replaces the GTX 660 Ti which has been discontinued. The GTX 660 still holds down the $179-189 price point and both are offered with a 2-game Holiday Bundle including Assassin’s Creed IV–Black Flag, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Be very careful to check that the etailer advertises the bundle, and has keys in stock before you order.  Generally the R9 270X does not come with a game bundle although Battlefield 4 is offered with select models.

Although we are going to focus on the PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ (part number AXR9 270X 2GBD5-PPDHE) performance, including overclocking it beyond its factory overclocks as we set it against the GTX 760/GTX 660, we shall also give you the Big Picture as we compare with nine other video card configurations.

The PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ Features and Specs

The R9 270X is a rebadge of the HD 7870.  It is exactly the same Pitcarin GPU with a different BIOS featuring 1,280 stream processors based on GCN (Graphics CoreNext) architecture, 80 texture memory units (TMUs), 32 raster operations units (ROPs), and 2GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit wide memory interface.  The R9 270X which launched at $199 uses the same Pitcarin GPU as the Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition which originally launched at $349 before dropping to and holding at $249 when its competition arrived.

The R9 270X reference core is clocked the same as the HD 7870 it replaces, but it boosts by 50MHz to 1050MHz.  Its memory speed is also significantly higher at 1400MHz.  The PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ is factory overclocked to boost to 1100MHz and its memory is overclocked 25MHz to 1425MHz.

PowerColor’s PCS+ series is made for overclocking and we are going to further overclock as far as we can go with stock fan profile and reference voltage. The PCS+ R9 270X uses PowerColor’s Gold Power kit, which includes Digital PWM, Ferrite Conducting Power (FCP), and Multi Phase Design to ensure power efficiency and stability when overclocking.

The exclusive PCS+ cooling design uses dual 90mm VGA fans, three heat pipes and cooling fins together with a pure copper base, to deliver a claimed 16% more cooling than the reference design. PowerColor has been using their patented PCS+ Double Blades fan design successfully for years, and we can see that the cooler for our own PowerColor HD 7970 PCS+, although larger, is similar to the new R9 270X PCS+ cooler.

The R9 270X vs. the GTX 660/GTX 760

The reference GTX 760 can be found for under $249 with mail-in-rebate while the GTX 660 can be bought for less than $179.  The PowerColor R9 270X sits in between them at $199.  We need to see how it fits in terms of value for its performance.

Since we do not want any chance of our CPU bottlenecking our graphics, we are testing all of our graphics cards by using our Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3770K at 4.50GHz, 16 GB Kingston “Beast” HyperX DDR3 at 2133MHz, and an EVGA Z77 FTW motherboard. The EVGA FTW motherboard features the 16x+16x PCIe 3.0 specification for CrossFire/SLI. The Core i7-3770K at 4.5GHz is fast enough to differentiate even high-end video cards at high resolution and at high detail settings.

Before we look at our test bed and run benchmarks, let’s unbox our PowerColor R9 270X PCS+ video card and look at its specifications.