MSI Radeon R9-270X HAWK review - Product Photos - MSI Radeon R9-270X HAWK

At the rear side of the card we see a rather familiar PCB. Overall a fairly clean design, the cards are PCI-E gen 3.0 compatible and will have one crossfire connector, so 2-way Crossfire is an option you could pursue. You'll notice that the card has a nice sturdy back-plate and also has a metal bar at the top to ensure stability when it is hanging vertically in the PC and you can see one vertical cooling or protective plate.

With a TDP of roughly 180 Watt the card needs to be hooked up to both a 6 PCI-E PEG power connectors. Under full stress we measured almost 180 Watts power draw, so that indeed is pretty spot on as advertised. The Twinfrozr cooler does an excellent job by the way, even pre-overclocked at 1150 MHz the temps during gaming remains at roughly 60 degrees C (hottest peak temp). The yellow design looks a little better as well. Under the metal casing there are aluminum fins connected to five 8mm heatpipes.

It is a pretty card to look at alright. If you like to go a little freaky then be sure to use the supplied voltage cables so you can monitor GPU, Memory and PLL voltages. 

And then with a DMM you can read out the GPU voltage. And as you can see, MSI applies a little higher then the normal voltage to the GPU. Which explains the higher factory overclock and our overclocking results. But we'll show you all that in a jiffy.