[section_title title=Overclocking]
Overclocking
For most reviewers this is probably their favorite part of any review. We all like to tinker with bit of kit to see how much of a bonus we can get out of them, and the MSI 270X was is no different. The first hurdle that I came up against was the voltage lock on the card. As with the HIS card, this is not MSI’s fault, these cards are all coming voltage locked out of the AMD factory so there is nothing that the vendors can do about it. This is mainly to stop people who don’t really know what they are doing from frying their chip then RMAing it for a new card, which is both costly and unfair to the manufacturer. Similar to what Nvidia implemented a few months prior, it was only going to be a matter of time before AMD followed the same route and locked out voltage controls.
The MSI 270X gaming comes in at a slightly lower stock clock speed on the core compared to the HIS IceQ X2. These clocks are 1120MHz on the core and 1400MHz on the RAM. Whilst marginally lower than the HIS, it is already fairly high. With the voltage control being locked, I was not at all confident of getting much out of the card. To my surprise I was able to get another 110MHz, to 1230MHz on the core but only another 65MHz on the RAM which was a little disappointing.
 
Whilst I was a little disheartened at the lack of overclocking I was able to get out of the RAM, having seen Brendan’s review, I felt that it was about right, considering the voltage lock. Even though this small overclock on the RAM would increase the performance of the card slightly, it would be the increase on the GPU core which would yield the biggest benefits in benchmarking and real world use.
Now its time to see how this offering will stack up against all of the other cards that we have had on test through Play3r. Lets get it on the bench and see how it does.
