Powercolor R7 250X 1GB GDDR5 Review

A Closer Look

The cooling solution on this unit is mainly for stylised effect. You get a rather long black and red plastic shroud with a 75mm fan which seems decent enough. However, underneath the pleasant exterior you get a rather basic heatsink that resembles a thinner version of Intel’s stock CPU cooler.

The PCB is red which is quite a bold look, this is a common theme Powercolor tend to run on their lower end cards. The heatsink is easily removable with the four screws that are not covered by a warranty sticker which means you shouldn’t void your warranty by removing it, although don’t hold me to that as the retail versions may differ.

The 6 pin power connector is horizontally mounted at the end.

The rear I/O contains a rather basic VGA, HDMI and DVI-D output selection. 4K users will need to use the HDMI port but will be restricted to 30Hz because of bandwidth limitations.

The bottom of the card has open venting that reveals the memory chips are passively cooled and are Elpida made.

The top of the card has no CrossFire X connector but AMD have said the R7 250X will support hardware and software CrossFire. That means you can enable CrossFire with or without a connector so it doesn’t really matter for end users either way!