HID Radeon R7 250 iCooler 1GB Review
Over the past few days AMD have released their latest range of GPUs, the R9 and R7 200 series. We took a look at some of the mainstream and enthusiast models earlier in the week and today we focus on one of the budget/entry level models, the R7 250 based on AMDs Oland GPU and retailing for around £69/$90. Running on Windows 8.1 we will find out what the card can do in the likes of Battlefield 4, F1 2013 and Total War: Rome 2. Can we play the latest games on a low cost GPU? Let’s get started…
The Card
HIS go with a fairly bright package for their R7 250 and while there is no image of the card we do get some information on the key specifications. Inside the box there is no bundle of note, just product documentation.
HIS go with a blue PCB for their R7 250 and attach a version of their iCooler to the front. It features transparent blue fins with an aluminium heatsink below. There are no Crossfire connectors on the R7 250 however it does support that mode (transferring traffic over the PCIe slot) and this is the 1GB version of the card.
HIS use the layout of Dual-Link DVI, HDMI 1.4 and then VGA connector. The HDMI output is capable of 4K output and no power cables are required for the cards 65w requirement.
Looking at the key specifications HIS go with a core peaking at 1050MHz and 1GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1150MHz (4600MHz). Being based on the Oland GPU, for the Stream processors AMD/HIS have gone for a 384 "core" design and our memory bus is 128-bit. PCIe 3.0, DirectX 11.2 and DirectCompute are all supported on this card as is acceleration of high definition content and the card can output 7.1 audio over HDMI including DTS Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD.
