14 DAY TRIAL // With all the talk about AMD's new Tonga GPU, we would have expected Sapphire's next available graphics card to be the custom-cooled Radeon R9 285. After all, the board was leaked not long ago. As it turns out, however, this is not the case.
Instead, it seems that Sapphire has launched a revision of a much older graphics card, and one that isn't all that powerful either. Specifically, the Radeon R7 250X.
The Radeon R7 250X was revealed back in February 2014 and is one of the few so-called “low-end” video cards still up for sale in the world.
Although the term is rather loosely used, especially when factoring in the tiny little detail that, despite being an R7, pretty weak card, the board still uses GDDR5 VRAM instead of DDR3.
It's all because of the integrated graphics chips found in all CPUs from Intel and APUs from AMD itself. With those covering the basics, there is no market for true low-end video boards.
Because of that, what were once mid-range graphics adapters are now entry-level ones. Sure, there is still the occasional DDR3-equipped card, low profile or otherwise, but those are mostly ways for companies to get rid of leftover RAM inventories. Also, they can be useful in HTPCs (home-theater personal computers) and nettops, if the CPU is a particularly weak model.
But we digress. Today we are here to talk about the new Sapphire Radeon R7 250X GHz Edition, which is essentially the same card as the one launched at the start of the year, but with better clocks. Factory-overclocking as it were.
The Cape Verde 28nm graphics processing unit (28nm, 40 TMUs, 16 ROPs) has a clock of 1 GHz, hence the name GHz Edition. The reference speed is of 925 MHz. Meanwhile, the 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM operate at 4.8 GHz instead of the 4.5 GHz on the stock card.
Other features include a dual-link DVI connector, one HDMI 1.4a port, one DisplayPort 1.2 connector, and a 6-pin PCI Express power connector. The GPU communicates with and controls the memory via a 128-bit interface.
Since this is a faster version of the Sapphire Radeon R7 250X Vapor-X, the Radeon R7 250X GHz Edition probably costs a bit over $100 / €100. To get the confirmation on this, you will have to check it out whenever it, complete with dual-fan cooler, gets listed by your local retailer.
