The last card on test is another from the substantial Asus range. Its full title is the R9 270X DirectCU II TOP, and it's worth every syllable.
The R9 270X is a performance card launched by AMD late in 2013. Since then, the prices have dropped significantly, and the manufacturers have tinkered with its abilities to hone it into a finely tuned piece of technology.
It's based on the Curacao XT variant GPU, with a core clock speed of 1050MHz and a GPU boost clock speed of a rather impressive 1120MHz, which is about 7% faster than the standard R9 270X. Furthermore, the 2GB of GDDR5 memory is clocked at 1400MHz with a memory bandwidth of 179GB/S.
It has 1280 shading units (which AMD refers to as stream processors), 180 texture mapping units and a TDP of 180W. It's a full-sized, dualslot card, drawing additional power from the pair of six-pin connectors. For this, you get glorious 2560 x 1600 resolutions from two DVI ports, HDMI and DisplayPort.
The obligatory 3DMark GPU score put this particular model at 8670, which is a smidgen over the GTX 760. This, of course, means that gaming is certainly top notch when played through this card, as are the other more mundane duties of normal desktop use. Photo editing was near enough perfect, but rather oddly we did have some problems when it came to the video editing.
The video editing test we ran used OpenShot to create a relatively small three-minute video, with a few transitions and a 3D animated title. It's nothing too intense but as much as an average user may get up to. For this, the other cards performed reasonably well, with the lower-powered cards taking a little longer to export the output and put it all together. The GTX 760 managed this in a relative blink of an eye, but the R9 270X seemed to stagger through the entire test.
Playing HD video, though, wasn't an problem, so perhaps there's something untoward with the drivers, since the hardware itself should be more than up to the task. Another issue was again the noise levels. While idle or performing normal desktop duties, the card was virtually silent. And when we first ran a game it remained that way for about five minutes, until it suddenly decided to increase the noise levels.
As with the GTX 760, though, it wasn't deafening, but it was a fair amount of noise, which required us to increase the volume on the speakers. As far as we could tell, though, the entire card was cool enough even when being benchmarked and gaming.
If you can take the noise levels and you want to play games, then Asus R9 270X is an excellent card. As far as the price goes, you can pick one up for around £145, which is a fair amount cheaper than the rival GTX 760. The video editing issues are worth looking more into, however, if you're planning on using the PC for that purpose. In that case, perhaps the GTX 760 is worth the extra expenditure.