AMD Radeon R9 270 Review: Replacing The Radeon HD 7800s

Power And Temperature Benchmarks

Our German team received a factory-overclocked card from Asus, so while our reference-clocked card reflects baseline performance, Igor's measurements are going to look a little bit higher.

There's a lot to like about AMD's single-monitor idle power result. However, AMD's cards are penalized with higher power readings when you plug in multiple screens.


The GeForce cards excel when it comes to low-power Blu-ray playback, but AMD claws back some ground in our gaming and compute-based power tests.

Specifically, the new Radeon H9 270 does well in these disciplines, particularly when remember that the benchmarks are taken from a factory-overclocked board.

This tells us nothing about AMD's reference Radeon R9 270 cooler, but Asus' Direct CU II does a great job of keeping the GPU at low temperatures during a prolonged gaming run. It never exceeds 70 degrees Celsius under load.

Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.