Sapphire Radeon R9 270X 4GB GDDR5 DVI-I/DVI-D/HDMI/DP Dual-X with Boost and OC version PCI-Express Graphics Card 11217-04-20G

I have spent quite awhile with this graphics card, and it dawned on me I never wrote a review for this great card, and with all the new holiday games coming out people would like to to know how well one of these older cards can handle them. I have benchmarked them, crossfired them, and overclocked them, so the review will be comprehensive of my total experience with this card. Let me tell you, it's a beast. Now I know there have been people who have had artifacting, BSODs, complaints about stuttering, etc., but having experienced all of these issues myself, ten times out of ten it was a user error on my part, and had nothing to do with my graphics card. Game performance is very, very good for what I had paid for this card, which at the time was $240. I was able to bulldoze through a heavily modded Skyrim consistently from 55-60 fps. The only time the card held me back was when I installed RealVision ENB to Skyrim, which is a very demanding ENB even for the latest cards, and now my framerates stay in the 45-56 range and only sink to 38 in heavily detailed cities. It ate FarCry 4 with ultra everything as long as my MSAA wasn't set higher than x4, but at 1080p the difference was negligible to me. NBA 2K15 was incredibly smooth, although it isn't a very VRAM intensive game. Shadow of Mordor ran very smooth, ultra everything, but as long as the Nvidia Gameworks stuff was off. The same can be said for The Witcher 3, although I did not expect Nvidia features to work well on a Radeon board anyways. Things got interesting when this card went on sale for $175 and I decided to go the Crossfire path. Having played with a crossfire setup for almost a year now, I would not recommend to crossfire these cards, although the reason is because the card is so good by itself. It ran everything smooth with one card, so there were almost no performance gains to be had. I would like to say it increased my stability, but it actually created longer loading times in my games for some reason, most notably in NBA 2K15, which would cause me to disable it. On that same note, almost all the games I own either do not have crossfire support, or there's more stuttering with two cards than with one, like in Fallout 4, where the microstuttering was very noticeable. (Although at the time of this review I think there has been no real crossfire support for Fallout 4 yet, and it defaults to AFR mode, although I could be wrong.) Now I am selling my second card and happily playing Fallout 4, Star Wars BattleFront, The Witcher 3, GTAV, and a 150+ mods Skyrim, maxed out graphics settings, with no issues whatsoever. To comment on the Sapphire part of the card, they did a great job with the Dual-X fan design. It keeps quiet, and keeps the card very cool as well, reaching only 61 degrees Celsius in my Firestrike benchmarks. I wish they would have included some LED lights onto the card but for the price it's me more whining than anything. I did try to do some overclocking for fun and was disappointed in its OC ability, but it runs so fast you don't need to overclock anyways, so this is not cause for loss of a star. All in all, if you pick this card up on sale, or are planning to buy it because it has 4GB of VRAM for the $200 range, I would not hesitate, and I would highly recommend this card to anyone looking for a budget card. When it comes to price to performance no one does it like AMD, just look at what they have continued to do with the R9 390, and now the weirldy-same-priced R9 390x.

UPDATE NOV 2015: Blown away. In March 2015 I built a new system, and brought this over to it as I deemed money would be better spent on SSD, CPU etc. This is the longest I've ever actively used a video card. I'm poking around for upgrades, and I see this is still going strong as one of the best bang-for-your-buck 4GB cards. So now, thanks indirectly to this card, I can spend money on a new monitor. The way my budget goes for my PC gaming, this thing has saved me tons of money. Running Fallout 4 at 50-60fps(almost always 60) with this card paired with my system: i5-4690K overclocked@ 3.9Ghz, 16GB Ripjaw Z RAM, Intel SSD, and Asus Z87 Pro mobo I will edit this when I finally hit a game it chokes on. My Review from JAN 2015 (purchased in FEB 2014): "Got this winter 2014, still rocking perfectly every day. Went to this card from a 6870, and this just eats up any texture pack I can throw at it for breakfast. First thing I did when I got this was download every super high res texture pack for Skyrim. My limiting factor is now everything else (CPU, mobo, RAM) My focus will be on stability and reliability. I have never run into any artifacts or glitches that were rooted in the Graphics Card hardware or on main non-beta AMD driver releases. I almost forgot to write a review for this because it does the job so well it disappears. This fall I've been playing two games that really brought my attention back to what a great job this thing is doing. Shadow of Mordor and The Vanishing or Ethan Carter. New games that are really pushing the envelope are usually my cue to start looking for a new card. This happens for me about every 1 1/2 years. I'm getting >40FPS on Shadow and >60FPS with Ethan Carter, with everything turned up all the way, on a nearly 5 year old computer (Phenom IIx6 1145t, 6G RAM) At this pace I'll not feel the itch to upgrade until 2, maybe 2 1/2 year mark. I'll will purchase a new PC first at this point. Great workhorse."

It's a good card. It gets good performance, it runs cool and quiet, and it hasn't "failed" yet. However, be warned. There is a known issue with many R9 270X cards where the screen will "flicker" briefly from time to time. There's a lot of examples of this on YouTube. It's not detracting, and it uncommon, but here's the real issue: if it does happen, and you need to fix it, you're going to have to be pretty tech savvy to apply the fix. I had to do Motherboard BIOS updates, had to install packages from Sapphire's tech support, even had to edit and create Registry Entries. I'm amazed at the hoops I had to jump through just to eliminate the flicker, and I'm concerned that the guidance from tech support was casual and passive at best. If I weren't tech savvy, I'm sure the resolution would've scared me off. I mean, chances are, if you're buying a graphics card, I guess I can assume you have the wherewithal to handle the tasks I outlined above. But should you have to? It's 2015; does Sapphire really expect that all of their customers have the skillset to create bootable USB drives and to know the risks involved in flashing your VBIOS? Again, good card, good performance, but be prepared to do some work to resolve some issues, like this flicker.

Didn't work. Won't buy used again

Great card able to game out some great tittles at great frames on 1080p had it for a year but if your looking to play in 2k or above buy a newer card

took an extra week for the mail to get here but great graphic's card. Very happy with purchase!

it was ok