Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce OC Review

Rating: 9.0.

If you are working with a budget of £180 or less there has never been a better time to buy a graphics card. The Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce OC that we are looking at today for instance is supplied in a preoverclocked state, with a custom cooler and has a retail price of only £164.99 inc vat. Is this the graphics card you need for a new cost effective system build in 2014?

AMD's R9 270X has proven popular so far, targeting the mass enthusiast audience who want a new graphics card to handle the latest Direct X 11 games at 1080p. What does the Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce OC bring to the table?

The Gigabyte card introduces the companies exclusive ‘Triangle Cool' Technology. This patent pending technology combines fin with clip module in a special triangle shape. This is meant to reduce turbulence between fans, lowering noise and increasing cooling efficiency.

The Gigabyte R9 270X Windforce OC ships in an overclocked state, with the core at 1,100mhz and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1,400mhz (5.6Gbps effective). Regular readers will be aware that this isn't as quick as the Sapphire R9 270X Toxic Edition OC which we reviewed some weeks ago – clocked to 1,150mhz core and 1,500mhz memory (6Gbps effective).

Specification:-
– PCI-E 3.0 Ready: Delivers double the bandwidth per lane of PCIe GEN2 for faster GPU- CPU
– Hugely overclockable
– Core Clock Speed: 1000MHz
– Boost Clock Speed: 1050MHz
– Shader Architecture: GCN
– Stream Processors: 1280
– Frame Buffer / Memory: 2GB GDDR5
– Memory Width / Speed: 256 bit / 5600MHz
– Power Connectors: 6-pin + 6-pin
– Display Outputs: 2x DVI + 1x DP + 1x HDMI
– Power: 180W TDP
– 3yr Warranty

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