14 DAY TRIAL // The Radeon R9 270X graphics card may not be in the same league as the R9 280X and R9 290/290X, but it's still strong enough to be considered overkill for most games. That wasn't enough for MSI though.
Case in point, Micro-Star International took the board and installed some more memory on it, along with Military Class 4 components.
Normally, the Radeon R9 270X runs the GPU at up to 1050 MHz, which is quite a bit for a chip with 1,280 stream processors (shader cores), 80 Texture Units, 32 ROPs and 256-bit memory interface.
That's enough to run any game at full blast, but Micro-Star International wanted it to be even better, especially in multi-monitor setups (Eyefinity).
So it overclocked the GPU, pushing the base clock to 1030 MHz and the GPU Boost maximum setting to 1120 MHz.
And as if that weren't enough, it also added 2 GB more memory, leaving the MSI R9 270X GAMING 4G, as the board is named, with 4 GB, all of it operating at 5600 MHz. At least that means that the clock of the VRAM was left alone.
That said, the MSI R9 270X GAMING 4G also uses a Twin Frozr IV Advanced cooler, with two fans and a black and red shroud.
Finally, the newcomer connects to monitors via Dual-Link DVI (two ports) HDMI and DisplayPort technologies.
In its announcement, Micro-Star International names Far Cry 3, Crysis 3, Skyrim and Max Payne 3 when outlining the prowess of the board, but says that its product should be good for whatever games come out in 2014 as well.
Even if, by some disaster, a game too demanding for the board becomes available (probably years down the line), the MSI Gaming App will be able to pull out more juice when activating the Gaming and OC modes. On a related note, there's a Silent mode too.
