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!
What is the performance of this R7 250x in terms of ‘CrossFire”mode. Given the I5 processor is somewhat computationally superior. However one the reasons I would take one of these lower end cards would be to benifit the graphics utility with the AMD Kaveris. I’m fairly certain that the results here,would be at least 20% better with using the AMD platform,and this card. And as with this the question would be which one,and what brand would be the better choice of the user wanting to do so.
I dont know what the equivalent technology is available when running a graphics card on the Intel platform. Although the ‘crossfire’ type scenario might be done. And I realize that ‘crossfire’,is actually a different term when utilized presently with the FM2+/Kaveri platform. Since Crossfire,can be used in dual mode,and it is probably not a default of the platform cpu in that vain. (For example two R7 250xs,or 240s on an ATX using the same processor in your system tests).
The AMD would use the same ideal of a medial system with 1866 memory as well. I know the difference between the two proprieties. I dont know which for the AMD platform would be the best low cost card to do so. And as a kicker the Nvidia vrs Crossfire could be seen as well. And compute would be better too.
Thanks.