Every new launch means new custom PCB designs from the manufactures. The first to hit our office this time around was an R9 270X from Gigabyte with their Windforce cooler design and an overclock. In the past I have been impressed with Gigabytes Windforce designs for their pure cooling power, I’m excited to see what three cooling fans on a large heatsink will do for keeping the R9 270X cool. But first let’s take a look at the card.

Product Name: Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce

Review Sample Provided by: Gigabyte

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

To check out more details on the new AMD cards check out our coverage HERE

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.

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Cooling, Noise, and Power

With a card like the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce I love seeing how it performs in our cooling, noise, and power testing. The reason for that is because with each card having a unique cooling design and an overclock you see major differences in performance here while the differences between similar cards in other performance categories are typically much smaller. To start things off, I jumped right into temperature testing, I expected the R9 270X Windforce to perform well with its three cooling fans as well as my past experience with the GTX 760 OC Windforce was impressive as well. This card however managed to impress me even more. My results ended up being the lowest I have tested. This is partly related to how Gigabyte configures their fan speed profiles, but having a giant heatsink with three fans on it must have played a big role as well.

For noise performance I wasn’t sure what to expect. Typically the more fans on the GPU the higher the noise levels on both idle and 100% load test. In this case the idle results were nearly at the top, but the 100% load results were much better. This means that even with three fans, Gigabyte created a design that has little wind resistance to create noise at speed; I would say that a lot of this can be credited to the open design of the top support bracket for example.

Power consumption for the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce at idle came in as one of the lowest on our charts, with only a few lower powered cards edging it out. Of course load performance is the most important and at 356 watts under load the R9 270X Windforce did pull a little power. This put it in below the GTX 760 reference card, the same card that AMD suggests be put against the R9 280X. Sadly I didn’t have a GTX 660 in my test results to get a direct comparison to what AMD is putting this card against, but the GTX 650 Ti Boost came in 37 watts less than the R9 270X Windforce.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks aren’t a good way to find out how well your card will perform in game. But they are a good way to compare different cards against each other because their results are consistent. Because of that I put the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce through our test suite to see how it compares to cards that are both above and below its price range. The end result shows the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce coming in just above the non GHz Edition of the HD 7870 and almost spot on for the GTX 760 in the new 3DMark Fire Strike. The same goes for the 3DMark 11 results, with it beating the GTX 760 in the performance setting but dropping down some in the extreme setting due to the cards smaller memory bus. All in all I found the results to be encouraging compared to the GTX 760 especially.

In Game Benchmarks

When it comes down to it, in game performance is what it’s all about right? Well the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce does it job and some. Of the 12 games I tested the card on, half of them pulled an FPS of 60 or higher with at least one being .2 below 60 FPS. As for the rest, they all came in over what most would consider playable (30 FPS) or better. This of course is with all of our tests turned all the way up including AA in most cases. Depending on if the benchmark favors AMD or Nvidia the results put the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce just below or just above the GTX 760, impressive!

Overclocking

When it came down to overclocking the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce, it was a bit of an adjustment for me. I’ve been used to overclocking on the Nvidia side of things with their unique clock speed “offsets”. With that I jumped into overclocking the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce with our standard overclock testing using 3DMark 11 to confirm the overclocks. I started with the GPU clock speed testing. The stock speed was 1100MHz and I quickly jumped up to 120MHz. Sadly past that I ran into issues until I turned it back down to 1225MHz. For memory testing I went about things the same way, but coming from stock speed of 1400MHz it didn’t take long before I reached the limit that AMD’s overclock settings would let me push the memory too. At 1625MHz I was capped without pushing the real limits. With that I combined my results and ran through and confirmed that the card could do both at the same time without any issues as well.

Overall and Final Verdict

Being our first R9 270X here in the LanOC Office I only had a rough idea of what to expect. With that, I was a little surprised when I opened everything up and found what can only be described as a massive card. The Windforce cooling extends the card out almost two inches beyond its already long PCB. Even with that I was impressed right away with the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce’s styling. Gigabyte blacked the entire card out, giving the card a bit of a batman theme that I really dig. After getting into testing I was even more impressed with the card, especially in its cooling performance, but in every test I put it through. I think the only potential downside to the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce is the length issue I previously mentioned, if you have limited space in your build you might run into issues.

When it comes to value, we have to take into account both the performance as well as the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce’s $199 MSRP. At that price, compared to other R9 270X’s it is well priced with its overclock and aftermarket cooler. What about compared to other cards? Well compared to Nvidia’s offerings this is a better value, the GTX 760 is nearly $50 more and in multiple cases the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce matched its performance. But what I was a little concerned with was in comparison to the HD 7870 GHz Edition that the R9 270X is a rebadge of. A quick look on Newegg shows multiple models selling for $20 less or you can get the Windforce edition for the same price as this card; all of those include two games as well. Hopefully AMD bundles games with the R9 270X’s in the future as well. In the end you really have to look to see if you can find an HD 7870 GHz edition cheaper, if not the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce is a great buy for a card that plays everything with good to great performance. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.