ASUS R9 270 Direct CU II OC 2GB Graphics Card Review

Overclocking

Like with the AMD HD 7850 the overclocking on the R9 270 is heavily limited by CCC restrictions. In the case of the R9 270 to no more than 1050MHz core and 1500MHz memory. However, MSI’s Afterburner (which I use for overclocking) along with most other GPU overclocking utilities (like ASUS GPU Tweak) allow you to circumvent these restrictions easily on the R9 270. By doing so we were able to boost that overclock from 1050MHz/1500MHz to 1154MHz/1520MHz up from the stock factory speed of the graphics card which is 975MHz/1400MHz. To add another set of confusing numbers to the mix remember that is already up from 925MHz/1400MHz reference speeds of the R9 270 GPU.

Compared to ASUS factory speeds on this graphics card our final overclock was an impressive 18.4% on the core and 8.6% on the memory. Compared to reference AMD speeds our final overclock was 24.8% on the core and 8.6% on the memory. That is some seriously impressive overclocking potential right here. Of course we can’t say if this is representative of all R9 270s, its likely that ASUS’ version overclocks better than some rivals as ASUS often have one of the best VRM implementations.

In terms of results, our final overclock of 1154MHz/1520MHz scored P8861 in 3DMark11 Performance, at factory speeds it managed P7930 so that is a 11.8% boost in performance from overclocking. With CCC limitations the performance was slightly less but the gain in overclocking was still nice, around 7% . When you push the ASUS Radeon R9 270 to its limits it comes within biting distance of the R9 270X and the GTX 760 – both of which are more expensive graphics cards.