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.
