Sapphire Radeon R9 270X Vapor-X Video Card Review

Benchmarks

This card came out over-clocked and with no fan noise I decided to keep it at the allotted settings because as ATI stands, over-clocking is their flair and I want to show its best and most powerful performance when it comes to Video games.

Test Rig Specs:

CPU:	Intel Core i5 3570K @ 3.40GHz
RAM:	24.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard:	ASRock Z77 Extreme6 (CPUSocket)
Graphics:	2048MB Sapphire ATI R9 200 Series
Hard Drives:	119GB M4-CT128M4SSD2 ATA Device (SSD)932GB Seagate ST1000DM003-9YN162 ATA Device (SATA)
Case:	NZXT Phantom 410

 

PCMark8 Test:

IceStorm Extreme:

Cloudgate:

 

Fire Strike Extreme:

Unigine Heaven

 

With the images above you may notice that the card is able to sustain some very stressful environments and with Firestorm staying at 15 FPS on EXTREME settings is a very successful test to understand the cards limitations.  We have a general idea that this card is able to live through everything and anything in today’s market of gaming, on High to Ultimate settings. Side note, Firestrike is meant for the highest end graphics cards and even my own 670GTX MSI struggles to keep above 35 with Extreme settings. But that knowledge should not deter you from this amazing piece of hardware that will eliminate all the competition with its price tag.

Video Games:

Battlefield 3 on Ultimate Settings:

As you can see FRAPS shows 40 lowest and 71 highest frames per second on highest setting in Battlefield 3. Disregard my blabber about the server.

Tomb Raider Screenshots

Conclusion:

Overall impression on this card is a positive beauty of 200$. It was able to play everything without a hiccup. I turned up Battlefield 3 on my own time on 1 monitor on the highest settings and ran a movie on the other monitor and was able to perfectly enjoy both of those.

Pros:

• Great performance
• Cheap price
• Amazing temperature with overclocked settings
• Easy to use software
• Outstanding on all tests

Cons:

• Comes OC’ed (some may not be 100% with this feature)
• When it does heat up, the fans get rather loud, but to get it hot is the hard part.

While this card is not the top of the line in the current generation of cards, I will recommend anyone building their own PC’s to look into getting one of the new R9 series cards starting with this beauty and maybe even upgrading to the higher end models. If you are a gamer looking for a cheap but amazing performance card, this one is for you.