ASUS Radeon R9 270 DirectCU II OC Review
Published by Christian Ney on 27.11.13Page:
The card
As mentioned earlier, ASUS decide to use the same cooler for R9 270 DC2OC that we have previously seen on the ASUS Radeon HD 7790 graphics card. This version of the DirectCU II cooler features two 8mm nickel plated heatpipes and a single large fin stack made of aluminium soldered to heatpipes and in contact with the so called base. The base on the other hand, surrounding the aforementioned heatpipes, covers a rather large area and features holes for mounting. Like most of ASUS' DirectCU coolers, the heatpipes are in direct contact with the core for more efficient cooling (the contact area is not nickel plated).
Overall the cooler is well manufactured but the heatpipes base is far from the mirror finish. On the upper side you can see a thermal pad which only makes contact with one and a half memory chips so we are not quite sure the use of it. The used thermal paste is pre-applied type, dry looking and spread around the core. Although the cooler is well manufactured, the thermal paste looks so cheap that we have decided to remove it completely and apply some good thermal paste to see if it will take better care from the manufacturer choice and offer some better thermal performance. With the new thermal paste temperatures were 3 and 4°C lower in idle and load, respectively, when compared to the originally applied thermal compound.
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The ASUS R9 270 DC2OC uses a custom PCB with a custom power design. ASUS went for a so called 6+1+1+1-phase power design implementation where the GPU gets six phases, which is still two phases more compared to the AMD reference design and one phases each for the memory, PLL and the PCIe. Component wise, the DC2OC complies with ASUS Super Alloy Power standard.
Checking the voltage regulation chips we found a digital multi-phase controller labelled Hybrid Digi+ VRM ASP1215 (a rebranded CHiL) taking care of both GPU and memory voltage regulation.
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The memory chips used are made by Elpida and carry the model number W2032BBBG-6A-F. They are specified to run at 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).
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