 Corsair's Raptor line of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you'll like. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and review of a product that I can't figure out the reason for its existence. This is the R9 270 from AMD. In particular, we have the MSI Gaming Edition with their Twin Frozr cooler, their military spec, military class design, so that means very robust components, great for overclocking and running cool and lasting a long time and all that stuff, as well as, well, that's pretty much it. The cooler and the better designed PCB are kind of the benefits of a gaming class card from MSI. Alright, so why can't I figure out why it exists? Well, because it's pretty similar to the 270X. So it comes with a 2mol X to single PCIe 6-pin adapter. It's a 150W TDP card, so you only need a single 6-pin connector. You've got some user guide and driver disks and all that. Don't worry about it. Alright, so the graphics card itself has a fully featured core, which means 1280 stream processors, a 256-bit memory interface, and the only real difference between this and its bigger brother, the 270X, is the slightly lower frequency on the GPU core. So a reference 270 would be clocked at around 925 MHz, whereas a reference 270X is going to be at 1.05 GHz. Now, with that said, this MSI one comes clocked at 975 MHz anyway. So the performance is very, very close, and it costs about 10% less. Now, all of the usual features, with the exception of true audio, are supported. DirectX 11.2, their new Mantle API, which is going to have support in Battlefield 4 and Star Citizen, and some upcoming games coming soon, although we've yet to find out how much of a performance difference that makes. It does have support for their new Easy iFINITY, so you can plug three displays into whichever three connections you want, and you can even use a DisplayPort hub to connect up to six displays to this individual card, although for a 2GIG card with this kind of power, I wouldn't really recommend running iFINITY 1080P and expecting to play the latest games at Ultra Details. The performance is going to be everything for this. Now, our usual thing is we take the cards... Oh yeah, I guess we should do a bit of a tour of the cards. So we've got MSI 100mm propeller blade fan, so they have the coating on the edges, they spin backwards in order to prevent dust buildup and all that noise. Speaking of noise, it's very, very, very quiet. Then we've got some heat pipes down here, so we've got two heat pipes leading out to a pretty large, actually, aluminum fin array. So you can see that there is a bit of a PCB extension right here, so it's actually longer than the PCB itself, but for good reason, because they've actually got more cooling potential there. They've also got their usual rigidity enhancing piece right here that actually does help the card sag and droop less. We've got a Crossfire connector supporting up to two-way Crossfire configurations, and a gorgeous matte black PCB on the back. We've also got a PCI Express 3.0 16x interface and the aforementioned six-pin PCI Express plug, so you will be... yeah, that's pretty much it. Okay, so it comes down to performance and price. So the price is better than a 270x, and the performance, once we overclock this thing, we got this thing just absolutely rockin'. Because it's a non-reference card, it does overclock, and it is cool better than our reference 270x, and we actually got pretty much the same performance with max overclocks on this card and the other one. So we're looking at something like this going, holy crap, well this thing's fantastic, it's basically just cheaper. So this is why I'm saying, the whole I don't know why it exists thing, because AMD is basically undercutting the 270x by bringing this card to us only a couple weeks later, and it's performed great. So without further ado, I'm gonna hand things off to Slick, and he can let you guys know that the performance is awesome with actual graphs. Whoa, hey, hold on, okay, I'm back. No, I missed something. Okay, so they've got their ZeroCore technology, which basically turns off the GPU when your system goes to sleep and the display goes off, so you can actually save a lot of power that way, not full sleep, display off sleep, just to be clear. And I wanted to talk a little bit about our testing methodology for our graphics cards. We overclock every card, so the cold hard truth is yes, designs like this will do better than reference designs a lot of the time, but then's the breaks. I guess that is a lesson about buying non-reference cards versus buying reference cards, if you want the absolute maximum performance when you're overclocking. You can see all of our overclocking settings in the graph and chart that is actually linked below the video description, so you can see exactly what we're doing. And if you want to see stock benchmarks, there are of course a hundred other sites that'll have stock benchmarks for this card, so feel free to go and check those ones out, but we're showing overclocked numbers in all of our games at 1080p, which is what this card is designed for, 1080p sweet spot performance. And now, off to Luke, Slick, whatever his name is. The first thing to notice is that in our overclocked benchmarks, the 270 beats out the 270X, just like in our overclocked benchmarks how the 290 beat out the 290X, although in this situation it's slightly different because our 270 has an aftermarket cooler where our 270X did not, so there's a slight difference there. For overclocking with this card, it was actually quite simple. You take all the sliders to the very end, click apply, and you're done. It's completely stable. We had a core clock of 1050 the entire time. No matter what I threw at it, it was completely stable. And this was awesomely boring. It was awesome because you get to just take all the sliders and put them at the end, which is always kind of fun, but then it was boring because it just kind of worked and had no issue whatsoever, and there was no fine tuning or anything like that. It was just put them all at the end and you're good to go. It only got to 63 degrees and the fan speed only went up to 27% on the heaviest load I put it on, so it seems like there might be some extra power there that it could harness, but it just isn't. Other than that, it performs really well, and as Linus said, I'm not entirely sure why it exists, but I'm happy it's here. So that's about it. If you liked the video, like the video. If you disliked the video, dislike the video. And in the comments below, what do you think about AMD's new naming scheme and all these different products that they're releasing with very similar but different names? And as always, subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.