Asus Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II TOP review

The Asus Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II TOP is Asus’s take on the great-value AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics processor. We were mightily impressed with the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X graphics card, and the Asus Radeon R9 270X DirectCU II TOP’s specifications suggest it’ll compare well with the Sapphire model.

The R9 270X employs 1,280 stream processors to deliver high-end graphics, and the graphics processor in the Asus R9 270X DirectCU II TOP runs at a clock speed of 1,120MHz, 70MHz higher than AMD’s reference cards. The Asus card is also armed with 2GBs of DDR5 memory running at a clock speed of 1.4GHz.

The Sapphire card has a higher graphics processor clock speed of 1150MHz and a higher memory clock speed of 1.5GHz, but it’s also much longer at 308mm. Indeed, it’ll only fit in the longest cases. The Asus R9 270X DirectCU II TOP is still long at 280mm, but is likely to fit in many more cases.

The R9 270X DirectCU II TOP produced an average frame rate of 81.4fps in our Dirt Showdown benchmark at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with graphics quality set to Ultra. That frame rate’s a little slower than the Sapphire’s average frame rate of 82.9fps in the same test, but you’re not going to notice the difference.

In our Crysis 3 benchmark the Asus 270X DirectCU II TOP produced an average frame rate of 41.5fps at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with graphics quality set to High. The Sapphire Toxic R9 270X gave an average frame rate of 40.6fps, which is a negligible difference.

We saw an ever-so-slightly wider difference in frame rates between the two cards when we used them at a resolution 5,760×1,080 over three monitors in Eyefinity mode. In Crysis 3 with High graphics quality, the Asus card produced an average frame rate of 17.3fps with a 20fps maximum and 14fps minimum, while the Sapphire gave an average 18.5fps with a 21fps maximum and 15fps minimum.

The Asus and Sapphire cards are both great, but the Sapphire Toxic R9 270X is best suited to those with large PC cases who want to play games at very high resolutions, probably in Eyefinity mode. If you don’t have space for the Sapphire card and want to save a little money you should buy the Asus 270X DirectCU II TOP.