AMD announces the Radeon R7 250X GPU

Not great but vastly better than the R7 250

AMD Radeon Logo 2013Even though spring is not yet upon us AMD has gifted low-end gamers everywhere with an early rebranding called the R7 250X. This low-end graphics card has one real reason to be worth a second look though, it is very different from the R7 250 sans X.

You may recall that the AMD Radeon R7 250 is just a rebrand of the HD7750 with a new price tag to accompany the new name. If you were in the market for the HD7750 at the time, the new R7 250 is definitely cheaper but otherwise pointless. The specs of the 250 sat between the first rebrands of the chip called HD8570 and HD8670, 384 shaders at 1.05GHz and 4.6GHz GDDR5 on a 128-bit bus. Be still my beating heart.

With the new $99 R7 250X you get a slightly faster version of the Oland ASIC in the 250 with a few other stats bumped up, right? Wrong, and that is why the 250X is worth caring about, the extra $10 buys you a lot more. SemiAccurate won’t question why one would shop for a GPU with a two digit price tag but if you do, put this on the top of your list. Take a look at the specs.

AMD R7 250X GPU specs

Not good but far better than an R7 250

For an extra $10 going from 384 shaders at 1.05GHz to “up to 640” at “up to 1000MHz” is pretty impressive to say the least. Instead of an Oland ASIC you get the vastly better Cape Verde chip under the now enlarged heat sink and fan. The memory speeds may have gone down 100MHz or so but that isn’t a big deal here, doubling it’s size is. The raw GFLOPS count went up by over 50% but that doesn’t necessarily translate directly to anything in gaming but the performance uplift over the R7 250 should be pretty noticeable, as will upping the TDP from 65W to 95W.

AMD didn’t actually give any numbers comparing the card to any of their own, but there was a slide comparing it to an Nvidia GTX 650 which it pretty well pummeled. I would wait for independent reviews to come out before making up your mind on how it actually does. Then again if you are shopping in this area of the market, price is likely the biggest concern you have. AMD didn’t supply cards before NDA lift so don’t hold your breath waiting.

We would like to tell you more about things like why the slides used “Up to…” but AMD held no briefings on the R7 250X and only notified SemiAccurate about the device on Friday afternoon. Between a <72 hour deadline between notification and NDA lift and some other even more abject stupidities that we can’t talk about yet, it is hard to care about the R7 250X. Ironically that is a perfect fit for its target market.S|A

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Charlie Demerjian

Roving engine of chaos and snide remarks at SemiAccurate
Charlie Demerjian is the founder of Stone Arch Networking Services and SemiAccurate.com. SemiAccurate.com is a technology news site; addressing hardware design, software selection, customization, securing and maintenance, with over one million views per month. He is a technologist and analyst specializing in semiconductors, system and network architecture. As head writer of SemiAccurate.com, he regularly advises writers, analysts, and industry executives on technical matters and long lead industry trends. Charlie is also available through Guidepoint and Mosaic. FullyAccurate