VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2014-06-09
With the R7 250X OC video card, Gigabyte succeeds to provide for the entry-level market a competitive card which can run games at either medium or high detail levels, while using display resolutions up to 1680x1050. Plenty of connectivity options are also offered, along with a dual-slot cooling system which remains silent at all times.
At first we would like to thank AMD Canada for offering a sample of their Radeon R7 250X (GV-R725XOC-1GD) video card for testing and reviewing.
“GIGABYTE was founded in 1986, establishing our uncontested position in continuous technological innovation. By focusing on key technologies and achieving strict quality standards, GIGABYTE has been regarded as an innovative and trusted motherboard leader in the globe. To keep pace in a rapidly changing world, we have offered a comprehensive product line covering Motherboards, Graphics Cards, PC Components, PC Peripherals, Laptops, Slate Devices, Desktop PCs, Network Communications, Servers and Mobile Phones. We are dedicated to building up a full-range digital life, responding promptly and sonorously to consumer needs and desires.”
Ultra Durable 2
Ultra Cooling - Low RDS(on) MOSFET Design
Low Power Loss - Ferrite Core Choke Design
Longer Life - All-Solid Capacitor Design
GIGABYTE custom-designed 10 cm cooler
As opposed to the stereotype, GIGABYTE is able to maximize fan size to 10cm with the latest cooling design. With a 10cm fan, the card is virtually silent that its noise level runs much lower
Gold plated HDMI
Gold plated, durable large contact area connectors have been used for optimum signal transfer between connections
OC GURU ll
Brand-new instinctive user interface, easier to monitoring and adjusting all important settings. Users can set up MONITORING, GPU CLOCK, MEMORY CLOCK,FAN, OSD, ONLINE SUPPORT and update driver, BIOS directly.
The card comes shipped in an enclosure sporting a familiar color scheme; on the frontal side Gigabyte is advertising the custom 100mm large fan they have used with the cooling system but we are also reminded that we are dealing with a factory overclocked card. The variant we are reviewing is equipped with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM, but on the market there is also a 2GB version available, which can be differentiated by a slightly different box-art and a cooler with a different shaped plastic shroud:
On the back side of the box we will be able to see a description in more detail of the board main characteristics:
By lifting the top cover, we will spot the documentation along with the card itself, but also a separate compartment with the rest of the bundle:
The Quick Installation Guide is also shipped along with an installation disk and the manufacturer has also included a PCI-E 6-pin to Molex power adapter:
The card cooling system is comprised of a large circular heatsink which is cooled with a proprietary 9-blade 100mm fan, surrounded with a black plastic shroud:
Here are some additional views on the laterals, which allow us to spot some of the heatsink components. As we can clearly see, the circular heatsink exceeds with just a bit the size of the blue PCB:
Extra power is supplied to the board via the included 6-pin PCI-Express connector:
As the Crossfire finger or the PCI-Express connector, Gigabyte saw fit to protect all ports during transit; these plastic covers also keep the ports dust free so we may want to leave them on if we do not use the respective ports:
Here is also a closer look at the back side of the PCB:
In order to get access to the top side of the PCB, we need to focus on the four spring-loaded screws on the back side, which keep the cooling system in place:
The heatsink comes off very easy and we will be able to expose this way the main card components; since the fan does not have three wires, we won’t be able to monitor the exact RPM values:
The GPU is located in center, surrounded by four RAM chips and on the left and right we will get to see the VRM components:
The tiny 28nm Cape Verde GPU is laser etched with different serial numbers:
The four GDDR5 memory chips are manufactured by Elpida and come with the model number W2032BBBG-60-F:
A closer look at the GPU heatsink shows gives us a better idea on how the heat is dispersed during load:
CPU: Intel I5 3570K Retail @ 4.7GHz
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 OC
RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 2x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)
Video: Currently reviewed card
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
With the help of the GPU-Z 0.7.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
The latest version of the OC GURU II overclocking utility can be downloaded from the manufacturers’ website and from the main interface we can fine-tune the clocks for both GPU and memory, increase the voltages, set custom fan curves and more:
The Monitoring section can be opened in a more advanced way, which shows live graphs of the current GPU Clock, Memory Clock, GPU Voltage, Memory Voltage, current Fan Speed or GPU Temperature:
In order to create new fan profiles, we will have to access the respective section and draw a graph:
The location of the OSD can be modified, along with the hot key, the Screenshot hot key and some screen settings:
For finding out the temperatures in both IDLE and Full Load with the fan set on Auto, we left the computer IDLE for about 25 minutes and then started monitoring with HWINFO64 and logged the values obtained while running Heaven 4.0 at 2560x1440 resolution for an additional 30 to 40 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 24.6 degrees Celsius.
Before measuring out the noise the video card was producing, we have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and we found out it was 28.9dBA (with everything turned off).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 20cm near the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by OC Guru II, but we were not able to record the RPM values for each step:
Considering the selected price point of the Gigabyte R7 250X OC video card, which is in fact a renamed Radeon HD 7770, we should not expect stellar performances at Full HD resolutions and more, even if we have plenty of connectivity options for this card. When we have tested the R7 250 from HIS, we have seen that it was insanely overclockable but we have only succeeded to surpass a regular Radeon 7750. With the R7 250X we will see that the card can deliver much more performance right from the start, so we were able to see the card performing quite well at 1680x1050 resolutions, some games even getting over 60 frames per second. There were quite a few releases which could not deliver this much, so for those we have two options: we will either skip some of the detail levels or try downgrading the resolution a bit.
Regarding strictly at the Gigabyte 250X OC model, we were surprised that the manufacturer does not skip the level of quality even at entry-level cards, so with this model we were able to see a custom fan model along with a large heatsink (dual-slot), which succeeds to keep the temperatures at very low levels even after long periods of usage in Full-Load. One important factor to be mentioned is that the card succeeds to remain silent at all times, so we are not afraid to recommend it for HTPC builds, where we could also do some light gaming.
The card was overclocked from the factory, as previously mentioned but we also went ahead and raised the frequencies further in order to see how much can it go up. We were able to go up to 1130Mhz for the core by using the OC Guru II application, nearing 5000 points in 3DMark11, Performance Mode.
The tested card is available online for about 81 Euros and as how we have mentioned earlier in the review, a 2GB version is also available for about 90 Euros.
We would like to thank AMD Canada for making this review possible!