HIS Radeon R9 270 IceQ X2 2GB Video Card Review

The Card

Taking a look at the card, you don't really see anything new when it comes to the overall look thanks to the cooler taking up majority of the card. The IceQ X2 cooler isn't anything new to us and you can see the dual fan setup along with the copper heat pipes coming out the bottom of the card.

Taking a look around the card, you can see that the R9 270 2GB requires just a single 6-Pin PCIe power connector to get up and running. As we move to the top of the card and closer to the front, you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector in the event that you want to run two of these cards together.

Finishing up with the I/O side of things, you can see we've got just a single Dual Link DVI connector. HIS has seemed to drop the second one and instead opt for two Mini-DisplayPort connectors instead of just a single full size DisplayPort connector. As a fan of DP, I prefer this setup personally. To round things off, you can see we've also got a HDMI connector.

Specifications

Taking a look below, you can see the specifications of the card. Today we're not dealing with a "Boost" version of the HIS card, so the clocks below match the reference ones. That means the core comes in at 925MHz, which is down on the 1050MHz that the R9 270X offers. As for the 2GB of GDDR5, that comes in at 5600MHz QDR on a 256-bit bus, which is the same as the R9 270X.

When it comes to the core features of the cards, they're really both quite similar to each other. Stream Processors, Texture Units, and ROPs are all the same at 1280, 80 32. Both also don't feature TrueAudio and are built on the TSMC 28nm core.