Card Layout and Photos
The overall design of the R9 270X Windforce eye catching with its triple fan design in your face. It screams that cooling performance is the top focus of this card. Along with that I love that Gigabyte went with an all-black design from the fans, fan shroud, brackets, and the PCB. I can imagine that if Batman was building a PC (and apparently on a bit of a budget, ha) he would be looking at something like this.
Before I jump into more photos of the card, here are a couple snaps of part of the packaging, when this card was shipped to me it didn’t have the rest of the packaging with it. I do love how the card comes in its foam shell with its accessories tucked in up under in.
The top support bracket on the R9 270X Windforce has a look that reminds me of the frame structure of some skyscrapers. It has a support structure while having a mostly open design to give the best airflow from the heatsink it would otherwise cover up. Speaking of that, the overall design of the Windforce cooling focuses on pushing the air through the heatsinks and then down or up out of the card. There is very little air that will be going out of the rear vent.
For power the G9 270X requires two six pin power connections. Gigabyte made sure to leave a little extra room for the clips by notching their heatsinks.
For crossfire you get one crossfire bridge connection, Gigabyte also make sure to shape the metal support bracket around the connection to prevent any compatibility issues.
I mentioned it before, but as you can see with the card flipped over, you get a full black PCB to match the rest of the all black design. Here you can also see that the length of the PCB is shorter than the overall length of the card. I love how there is another shroud here as well to help protect the heatsink fins. That shroud still has ventilation in it for the air coming out of the third fan to blow over the heatsink and out the back.
On the expansion slot end of the card the R9 270X Windforce has a fairly basic configuration. You get two DVI connections with one of them supporting analog pass-through for DVI to VGA adapters. You also have a full sized DisplayPort as well as a full sized HDMI connection. This is basically what I see on every card anymore. There is a vent as well but as mentioned before this design won’t be venting much if anything out of this direction.
