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Radeon R7 240 And 250: Our Sub-£80 Gaming Card Round-Up

Radeon R7 240 And 250: Our Sub-£80 Gaming Card Round-Up
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Now that AMD's Radeon R7 240 and 250 are here, we want to know a little more about what the sub-£80 market looks like. Can the latest Oland-based boards serve up playable performance in the latest titles, or are there other hidden gems to discover?

Without a doubt, high-end gaming PCs can get really expensive. Even our definition of "mid-range" hovers around the £800 mark. With a bunch of PC-derived technology at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, it's no wonder the latest consoles are so appealing at £349 and £429.

There's another way to think about the market, though. Consider how many people own desktops. Sure, a lot of them have old, crappy integrated graphics engines wholly insufficient for gaming. Often times, though, the only component differentiating a weak word processing machine and a capable entertainment platform is a decent graphics card. Adding one might turn a modest little box into a system strong enough for Battlefield 4 or Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

But what if you're on a strict budget? Can you achieve that goal with less than £80?

Today we're going to compare inexpensive graphics cards to see what they're capable of in modern titles at fairly demanding settings. We're also going to scrutinize AMD's recently introduced Radeon R7 240 and 250 cards. Do they offer good value to gamers with limited funds for new hardware? 

Here are the cards we're comparing, along with their specifications:


GeForce GT 630 GDDR5GeForce GT 640 DDR3
Radeon R7 240
Radeon HD 6670Radeon HD 7730Radeon R7 250Radeon HD 7750 GDDR5
Radeon HD 7770
Shader
Cores
96
(Fermi)
384
(Kepler)
320
(GCN)
480
(VLIW5)
384
(GCN)
384
(GCN)
512
(GCN)
640
(GCN)
Texture
Units
16
3220
24
24
243240
Colour
ROPs
4
168
8
8
816
16
Fab
Process
40 nm
28 nm28 nm
40 nm28 nm28 nm28 nm28 nm
Core
(Boost)
Clock
900 MHz
900 MHz730
(780) MHz
800 MHz
800 MHz
1000
(1050)
MHz
800 MHz1000 MHz
Memory
Clock
900 MHz DDR3891 MHz DDR3900 MHz DDR3900 MHz
DDR3
or
GDDR5
900 MHz
DDR3
1125 MHz GDDR5
900 MHz DDR3
1150 MHz GDDR5
1125 MHz GDDR5
1125 MHz GDDR5
Memory
Bus
128-bit
128-bit128-bit128-bit128-bit
128-bit128-bit128-bit
Memory
Bandwidth
28.8 GB/s DDR3
28.5 GB/s DDR328.8 GB/s28.8 GB/s
DDR3
64 GB/s
GDDR5
28.8 GB/s DDR3
72 GB/s GDDR5
28.8 GB/s DDR3
73.6 GB/s GDDR5
72 GB/s72 GB/s
TDP
65 W
65 W30 W
44 W
DDR3
60 W
GDDR5
47 W
60 W
55 W
80 W
Typical
Price
£45 - £55
£55 - £70
£50 - £60
£55
DDR3
£65
GDDR5
£60 - £80£60 - £75
£65 - £80
£70 -£90

As you can see, lot of these cards are available across a fairly wide price range. For example, the GeForce GT 640 ranging from £55 to £70 depending on retailer and manufacturer. We've done our best to extrapolate a typical price. No matter how you do the math, though, this is a bit of a challenge for nailing down value. We should still have enough performance data by the end of this story to draw sound conclusions, though.

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  • 1 Hide
    tonyzet , 29 January 2014 08:08
    10 pages to conclude to get a 7770/90 and not anything cheaper. We knew it since last year...
    #wasteOfServerSpace
  • 0 Hide
    das_stig , 29 January 2014 09:02
    Waste of bandwidth, could have just said, "Don't bother with the R7 240/250, get a 7750/7770 GDDR5 for better performance at near enough same price !"
  • 0 Hide
    kyzarvs , 29 January 2014 19:30
    ^agreed, but where would they have put all the adverts if they'd got to the point on time? ;) 
  • 0 Hide
    Dirk_p_broer , 29 January 2014 23:41
    Why not include the GT 630 (Kepler) with 384 shaders?
  • 0 Hide
    mi1ez , 2 February 2014 20:15
    I was kind of hoping to see a comparison with AMD's higher end APUs.
  • 0 Hide
    eldridgep , 5 February 2014 19:25
    Availability of the 7750 is getting worse I ended up getting a R7 250 myself and at 1920x1080 on a single screen I'm very happy with performance to be honest. If you are on a budget or upgrading an older rig (I was on both) the R7 250 and 7750 not needing additional power connectors are a real bonus and getting a single slot solution for my cube PC case was also a deciding factor. Remember the R7 250 also supports mantle which might be promising in the future.