Sapphire AMD Radeon R7 265 Dual-X 2GB Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Sapphire’s R7 265 Dual-X currently sells for $159.99 on Newegg in the USA and for £109.99 on Overclockers in the UK. Sapphire’s R7 265 Dual-X has a 2 year warranty.

Overview

Sapphire’s R7 265 runs very cool and quiet under typical gaming loads. When temperatures start to climb under extreme loads (Furmark, GPU mining…etc) it can get a little noisy but it still has solid temperatures of around 70 which means there is ample headroom to create a less aggressive fan profile if you prefer higher temperatures in return for less noise. Whichever way you look at it the Sapphire R7 265 Dual-X is an effectively cooled graphics card that runs cool enough to allow for a great deal of flexibility in fan management. In terms of performance it is hard to argue with the proposition of 13% more performance than the GTX 750 Ti for effectively the same cost. Of course the downside versus the GTX 750 Ti is that this card needs a 6 pin and consumes about 50-75% more power, however, for most people this is still a power frugal GPU consuming around 150W at maximum load and around 100W in gaming load. Some of you might be wondering about overclocking – why didn’t Sapphire overclock out of the box when the R7 265 has so much overclocking potential? To be honest, I’m not really sure. However, you can overclock and when you do you get incredible gains in performance – we saw around 20-25% more performance! What’s more when you overclock the temperatures barely change at all – the Dual-X is more than equipped for taming this R7 265 GPU.

Pros

• Competitive pricing
• Effective cooling solution
• Massive overclocking potential
• Flexible display outputs 
• Compact size

Cons

• No factory overclock
• Fan profile for higher temperatures could be more tame

“When it comes to what makes a solid mid-range graphics card, value for money, effective cooling, quiet operation and overclocking potential are all crucial. Sapphire’s R7 265 Dual-X delivers all of those things in abundance. If you’re building a gaming rig on a budget but still want performance that packs a punch then you needn’t look any further.“

Thank you to Sapphire Technology for providing this review sample.