VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2013-10-31
The new R9 270X implementation from HIS comes with a custom PCB, an award-winning cooling system which is very efficient while keeping the noise down and is also pre-overclocked. The card trades punches with the GTX 760 and succeeds to surpass it in some games which are heavily AMD optimized.
At first I would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost Clock 2GB Video Card for testing and reviewing.
“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.
HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.
Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.
HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.
In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.
Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”
We will continue with our R9 series presentation by looking upon the R9 270X from HIS. While the AMD GPU comes with the Curacao code name, it is practically identical to the previously launched Pitcairn architecture, along with a few improvements while keeping the card in the same price range.
The stock Radeon HD 7870 was operating at 1GHz core frequency and the memory clock was running at 1200MHz. It had 1280 Stream Processors, 80 Texture Units, 32 ROPs and 2GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit memory bus. With the R9 270X AMD has raised the GPU frequency to 1050MHz while the memory is clocked at 1400MHz. HIS went even further and overclocked the core to 1140MHz while keeping the memory frequency at the same speed.
The HIS R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost Clock card also comes equipped with a smaller version of the IceQ X2 cooling system which features a large heatsink sporting five 6mm wide heapipes that is cooled by two 86mm dual axial fans.
The PowerTune function is now available on the full range so the GPU clock gets modified depending on power draw, heat and performance factors. Eyefinity has been also updated to V2 DDM, with the ability of 5x1 landscape and custom multi-monitor resolutions. Also, with the new series we are permitted to use the Eyefinity feature without the need of a DisplayPort adapter.
If the card provides for example two DVI ports and one HDMI, we can use all three to set up Eyefinity.
At the latest presentation, AMD has also introduced the TrueAudio DSP, which is unfortunately not included with the 280X and 270X, but it is present in the 260X and also top of the line 290/290X.
Mantle is a new API introduced with the latest seriers, which gives the game developers direct access to the GPUs by using the Graphics Core Next architecture. AMD has recently clarified that Mantle creates for PC a development platform which is similar to the one for the consoles, which already offer low-level APIs, close-to-metal programming, easier development and more. By creating a more console-like developer environment, Mantle improves time to market, reduces development costs and allows more efficient rendering and ultimately improves performance for gamers.
DirectX 11.2, which is coming with Windows 8.1 is compatible with the new series.
The main attraction of the latest DirectX seems to be Tiled Resources, which exposes AMD’s partially-resident textures via DirectX and we are also dealing with hardware-managed virtual memory for GPU.
Turbo: HIS OC Graphics Card
Turbo cards are faster than regular cards! The card is bios-overclocked out of the box with 1100MHz / 5600 MHz core clock and memory clock respectively, offering the performance edge for gamers!
Boost Clock is Faster
The card has the latest Boost Clock technology, providing extra performance for the most demanding games and applications!
IceQ X² – Cooler, Quieter
Cooler
With IceQ X², the card is cooler than the reference cooler.
Quieter
IceQ X² is one of the quietest coolers, making the card quieter than the reference cooler. The card is below 28dB when watching movies, surfing Facebook, working. The card remains quiet whether you are gaming, online socializing, entertaining or working.
Fan Design
The super large 2x 86mm dual axial fans draws massive amount of cool air to cool the GPU directly.
The Q&C fan blade increases air velocity make cooling more efficiently while keeping noise level at minimum.
The fan is extremely durable with a life span of up to 50,000 hours.
The 5x 6mm wide heatpipes optimize cooling performance by removing heat from the core area.
The extra-large 60 x 62 mm copper heatsink provides a large area to dissipate heat efficiently.
The card also carries memory and mosfet heat sinks to provide extra heat dissipation from these areas.
The card also features fan control and monitoring, you are able to read fan speed & ASIC temperature from iTurbo or other software.
OC Equipment
The card is equipped with improved power design which is great for OC! HIS cards utilize Dynamic Phase Control PWM IC to save power for better use. Along with improved power design, digital power design, HIS cards make the best out of power, carrying better OC capability and pushing clock speeds to the full potential!
Built for Crossfire
CrossFireX Ready!
The card is armed with 2x Crossfire Connectors and is ready for up to 4-way crossfire for strengthened performance!
iTurbo - Your Graphics Card’s Assistant
iTurbo is your graphics card’s assistant to control your card to be quiet, cool. Experience overclocking by simply pressing the iTurbo Button!
User Friendly Overclocking Software: Cooler, Quieter, OC!
iTurbo's Fan Control and Fan Monitoring allow easy adjustment of your card to its maximum cooling performance or to run your card quietly!
Press iTurbo: OC Right Away!
With the smart auto overclocking function, users can experience a slight performance boost for selected HIS graphic cards with just one click!
Powerful Overclocking Software
Either you wish to unleash its full potential or to make it more environmental friendly, iTurbo is ready for you!
iTurbo is compatible with all cards! Enjoy OC no matter what card you have!
This sample we have received from HIS did not feature the outside layer of packaging, so we will present you guys beginning with the internal black box:
The card is surrounded with a thick layer of protective foam, so no damages would be made to the product during transport:
Besides the card we will also receive a DVI-to-VGA adapter; inside the retail box we should also receive some small leaflets along with the envelope which features the Quick Installation Guide and the small case sticker:
Initially, the top shroud is covered with a plastic transparent film, which must be removed before the first use:
The cooling system has a lot of similarities on the outside with the one we have found on the 280X, with a dual-fan solution while not exceeding the height of two slots:
The 86mm fan blades are specially designed for increased air velocity while keeping the noise levels at a minimum; the declared life span is 50000 hours:
In the top left corner we have the IceQ X2 logo while on the right we have a Turbo sticker meaning that we are receiving a pre-overclocked card:
If we look on the sides we will be able to see multiple pipes which travel from the bottom copper plate to the upper heatsink fins:
The cooling system does not exceed the length of the PCB by much:
On the back side of the PCB we are able to spot multiple stickers along with the GPU backplate:
The card features a single Crossfire finger:
In the front we have two mini-DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI and one DVI Dual-Link:
In order to access the top side of the PCB we will have to unmount the GPU heatsink, which is held in four spring-loaded screws:
After the heatsink is put aside, do not forget to carefully remove the fan power connector too, in order not to damage it during the process; in the middle we will be also able to see an aluminum plate which acts as a secondary heatsink for the VRM (which can be found on the left), but also for the memory modules:
In order to put this one aside too we will have to unscrew some additional spring-loaded screws from the back side of the card. One mention though: do not also forget to remove the two screws which are placed on the I/O shield, otherwise we may damage both the card and the plate. As it can be seen from the photo, the thermal interface between the plate and the components is composed from green thermal pads:
The card features ELPIDA W2032BBBG-6A-F GDDR5 memory chips which are specified to run at 1500MHz:
The card VRM is controlled by a CHiL CHL8225G which is very popular and offers software voltage control and monitoring:
In the middle we have the graphics processor featuring GCN shader architecture on 28nm, built at TSMC:
By looking on the back side of the large heatsink, we will get a better view on how the heat is evacuated, with the help of the multiple heatsinks and the large copper plate:
On each corner of the GPU plate we will see a black rubber spacer:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: Currently reviewed card
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.3 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 40 to 50 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 21.2 degrees Celsius:
From the HIS website, we can download the iTurbo video card utility, which is very handy for customizing the fan speeds, monitoring several parameters or performing overclocking. The interface is user-friendly and presents itself like a wheel:
The UI can open up in a larger form, in order to expose the full-sized interface. The menus can be accessed on top of the applications and these include Home, Info, Overclock and so on. In the Home tab we can find more news regarding the manufacturer, the ongoing promotions or the latest drivers:
The Info tab will display various hardware information regarding the card like card name, GPU series name, die size, memory size, bus width, ROPs and so on:
The Overclock tab comes with adjustments for the GPU Clock, Memory Clock, Board Power Limit (also present in CCC), but also VDDC. These modifications can be saved by assigning them to different profiles or we can simply jump to the factory defaults:
From the Fan Control tab, we will be able to monitor the current fan status or adjust the speed to a fixed or custom profile. These modifications can be saved as “Quiet” or “Cool”:
The final tab, Settings, lets us adjust some of the global options like Load on Startup, Show memory clocks, Disable 2D clocks and so on:
Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.5dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of Catalyst Control Center:
Here we are again drawing the final conclusions after testing the custom-built HIS R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost Clock card; the card features a consistent overclock from the factory on the GPU, while the memory clocks remained the same. The cooling system is a smaller variant of the IceQ X2 cooler we have found on the 280X, and is quite efficient meaning that the temperature did not exceed 52 degrees Celsius while running Heaven Benchmark for about 43 minutes. IceQ X2 functions optimally if we have a well-ventilated case since all the hot air is evacuated back inside the case and we need to avoid recirculation.
The card traded punches most of the time with our overclocked Inno3D iChill 760 video card and in heavily AMD-optimized games it even succeeded to surpass it.
With the help of iTurbo we were able to raise the frequencies even more and to test the stability we have used a combination of 3DMark 2011 combined with 3DMark 2013 at the end:
The HIS AMD R9 270X IceQ X2 Turbo Boost Clock card can be found online for about 183 Euros, while the GTX 760 video card it went against is available for 259.9 Euros, so at this moment we can talk about a great price/performance ratio.
We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!