MSI Radeon R9 270X Gaming Video Card Review

This section almost didn't exist in this review but we owe it to our readers to be consistent regardless of how badly a video card actually overclocks out of the box.  In this section we ramped up the clock speed using the latest MSI Afterburner Beta and were able to achieve.

wait for it.

1160Mhz!

Yes, a whooping 40Mhz higher than the already hot-clocked 70Mhz over stock.  That tells us that either this chip isn't that good or that we are already at the limit of the GPU and hot-clocking the card is just a way to make a good gaming card better.  We did get a decent bump in memory frequency but, overall this is extremely lackluster in our opinion.

If you look closely you will see that aside from getting a slightly better number the overclock was almost worthless in terms of performance gain.  For instance what would you do with 1FPS (average) gain in Crysis 2? 

We have see poor overclocking performance before and limited overclocks are not that uncommon and let's face it, the Gaming edition of the R9 270X isn't exactly what an overclocker would have chosen for their project but sometimes you get lucky.  Just not this time.

Keep in mind that overclocking is not guaranteed so your results may vary from one card to another.