 The Corsair carbide Air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or liquid cooling. Check the link in the video description to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and performance review of the Radeon R9 270X. It's a $200 GPU, meaning it's at the top end of that best bang for the buck $100 to $200 price range. And if you're familiar with the 7870 GHz edition, this card is going to look pretty familiar to you. So it's clocked at 1.05 GHz max on the core, and that relates to their new power tune technology. So when they say max clocks, the way power tune works is much like Nvidia's GPU boost 2.0, where it factors in not only the clock speed, the voltage, and the power limits of the card, but also temperature. So it's able to use all four of those data points to get the most performance possible out of the card at any given time. When you're overclocking, pretty much the best thing to do is turn up the maximum clock speed, turn up your available power limit, and then the card will pretty much do the rest for you. You can't do much with the temperature limits because they ship at their maximum recommended temperatures from AMD at this time. Now, the way that the fan works with respect to temperature is instead of ramping up and ramping down quite sharply, they've made things much more gradual, so it should be a less noticeable change in sound, meaning that the card will be less obnoxious to the ear when you're opening up games or closing them. Next up is the 2Gb frame buffer. This is the same as the 7070 GHz edition, but unlike the older card, it is also available in a 4Gb configuration for a few more bucks. This might be relevant to you if you're gaming at higher resolutions than 1080p or for future games. However, 2Gb looks like it's going to be pretty good for the time being, and because this card is positioned as a 1080p gaming monster, so maximum details 1080p, it's up to the individual whether that's useful for you or not. It has a 180 watt typical board power, meaning it needs two PCI Express 6-pin connectors in order to provide power, and it has 1280 stream processors. So that's pretty much it for the spec, okay? It supports DirectX 11.2, it supports OpenGL, ooh, it supports Mantle. So Mantle is important. It runs on any GCN architecture card, which this happens to be. It's pretty similar to the last gen, and pretty similar to what's in the Xbox One, PS4, and Wii U, and Mantle is a way for the AMD to allow developers to program almost directly to the hardware instead of going through an API such as DirectX 11. Well, Mantle is an API, but instead of going through one that is bloated and slow and bottlenecks the performance of your system. So Mantle is going to be launching on a couple of different titles. Battlefield 4 will be the first game with support for Mantle, and what it basically means is that the game dev has to code in a completely different path, and that sounds crazy. That sounds like a step backwards to the olden days, but it's maybe not, because a lot of the devs, especially if they're cross-platform devs, are going to be doing this similar work on the next gen consoles anyway. So we could be looking at tangible performance improvements for AMD cards on games running Mantle, and for end users it'll probably be as simple as something like a drop-down menu going from DirectX to OpenGL to Mantle, and just seeing a massive performance improvement, which is very, very cool. Now let's do an overall tour of the card here. There's a large 80 millimeter fan in a blower style that's going to exhaust air out the back of the card. We've also got a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface here at the bottom, the two PCI Express connectors that I showed you before. On the back we find a plain PCB with no sort of backplate or anything like that, and right here, ah yes, we find more technology. Two DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort, which might not look that interesting, but it is. So DisplayPort splitters are now a thing. You can run three monitors off of that single port, and if you don't feel like using DisplayPort at all and you want to run iFINITY, you can use two DVI ports and an HDMI port and no adapters with these latest generation cards. The maximum is 1080p 60Hz, or it might work at 1920x1260Hz, so you can't do, you know, 3D surround or anything like that without implementing a DisplayPort monitor in your setup, but I still think that's a major step forward in terms of compatibility and ease of setup for iFINITY. And that's not the only way that multi-display implementation has been simplified. Some 4K displays these days, in fact a lot of them, are going to require two cables, and then they're basically going to be two monitors and one, and AMD's new implementation on these cards is going to allow for automatic arrangement, okay? So the monitor is going to be able to communicate with the card and say, look, this is the one that's supposed to be on the left, this is the one that's supposed to be on the right, and detection of these tile displays so that they're completely transparent to the end user and you don't even know that there was a configuration process that happened. They're also launching their Raptor gaming app, which is more of a co-branding exercise, and it allows you to interact with your friends across platforms, it allows you to launch applications without closing down your game, it allows you to, it gives you rewards for playing games, and finally it optimizes your game settings on your own, on its own without intervention. So it finds other people playing similar games to you on similar configs, finds out what kind of performance numbers they're getting, and then allows you to select a slider anywhere from quality to performance depending how you want the game to run, and boom, it'll do up all the details for you in such a way that it'll run really well on your system. This is to compete with, of course, the GeForce experience from Nvidia, which is similar, except it doesn't cloud source the data from other gamers. Zero core technology is included, which basically allows your operating system to power down the GPU when it's not doing anything, but true audio is not. So that is the dedicated programmable DSP that's on the 260x and the 290 series, so you will still be using your CPU for audio calculations unless you either step up a whole lot or step down a significant amount in terms of performance. Now speaking of performance, without further ado, I'm handing this video off to Slick to tell you guys about the performance of the 270x compared to its competition. The charts presented before you are just a compilation of all the cards that I've been running on these three games over the last little while. Now you'll notice that the R9 270x has a running buddy from the Nvidia side, but something to notice in this little battle as well is that the AMD card is about $50 cheaper at launch, although this is subject to change, obviously. One thing that I do notice with this price point is that people are really searching for their best bang for the buck, so this is definitely going to be a card to watch because it is right in that price point. Now if you are someone looking for an AMD card, this might be the best bang for your buck card out there. We'll have to just wait and see. If you like the video, like the video. If you dislike the video, dislike the video, and in the comment section below I'd like to have a discussion about card rebadging. It's kind of a mixed bag all over the internet, whether people like it or dislike it, or what side they're really fighting for, their opinions about it, and all that kind of stuff, so I'd like to see what YouTube commenters think about card rebadging, and as always, if you like LinusTech tips, be sure to subscribe.