In these times of austerity, value for money is very much at the forefront of gamer’s minds when seeking out a graphics card. The AMD R9 270X looked to strike a balance between cost and performance and succeeded but like the flagship card, fell short in terms of cooling and acoustic ability. HIS aim to rectify this oversight by using their IceQ x2 cooling solution. Add to this one of the fastest factory overclocks on the 270X and HIS may well have a winner on their hands.

HIS have five different variants of the R9-270X, each with different factory overclock and heatsink. Some have the ICEQ X cooler while others, such as the item we have for evaluation today, have the ICEQ X2. It has a massive 1100MHz clockspeed as standard which is some 200MHz faster than entry level 270X. With the Tahiti LE at it's heart, the HIS R9 270X ICEQ X2 TURBO might just have enough to topple our current favourite mid-range GPU, the NVIDIA GTX760.