At first we would like to thank HIS for offering a sample of their R7 250 Twin Fan 2GB D5 LP Video Card for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About HIS:

 

“HIS - Hightech Information System Limited is an internationally acclaimed graphics cards company. Time and time again, HIS were compared and tested by hundreds of worldly renowned critics. The results are phenomena, HIS have proven to offer far superior, cooler, quieter, and faster graphic cards than any other leading rivals. Up to the fourth quarter of 2011, HIS has won over 1600 awards with AMD graphic solution from major media worldwide. HIS is being recognized by providing performance leading and award-wining products: IceQ, IceQ X and Turbo Edition.

HIS was established in 1987 with the mission to produce the highest quality PC products in the industry. Besides strong devotion to excellent products and services, HIS has been conducting business with the aim to "Glorifying God". Honesty and integrity are the two key principals of how HIS are conducted. Ethical business practice has been an everyday commitment to our clients, vendors, and investors.

Headquartered in Hong Kong, and with sales offices and distribution networks in Europe, Middle East, North and South America, Asia Pacific Regions; our worldwide customers benefits from efficient and localized services. ISO Certified, HIS's manufacturing facility in China is managed by a team of professionals with expertise in quality control and production planning. Working with world-class clients, HIS has been consistently meeting high quality standards and fulfilled volume order in short lead-time.

HIS is proud to be AMD's Authorized 1st Tier AIB Partner, Certified Partner and Launching Partner. Long term and favorable relationship with AMD, enable HIS to work closely with AMD to promote the HIS AMD Graphics Board; and to strive for best value on the marketing and sales of HIS AMD Product Line.

In Sept 2003, HIS incorporated the state-of-the art Supreme Cooling Technology in the award winning HIS 9800Pro IceQ, which caught the attention of worldwide media. Since then, HIS IceQ series and the latest IceQ X series has been the limelight in the market for its outstanding performance and features over the other rivals.

Today, HIS continues its avid commitment to quality product and service. HIS is certain to be Your Choice of Graphics Board Supplier.”

Product Features:

 

Twin Fan is Quieter

 

The card is equipped with Twin Fan, making it extremely quiet and noise level is less than 28dB. You feel the quietness when viewing photos, browsing webs, checking your email and playing movies in UVD mode.

 

Boost Clock is Faster

 

The card has the latest Boost Clock technology, providing extra performance for the most demanding games and applications!

 

High Quality Components

 

HIS uses only the finest materials and the most advanced techniques to build our cards, making them one of the most stable and durable product in the industry. The card is engineered with the highest standard of safety, preventing them any potential damages.

 

CrossFireX Ready!

 

The card's is supports software crossfire, ready for CrossFire & strengthened performance without the need of a crossfire bridge!

 

Product Specifications:

 

Quite some time ago and to be more exact at the end of year 2013 we have had on our hands the R7 250 iCooler Boost Clock 1GB video card from HIS which was a low-end offering for people on a very tight budget and also at that time we have recommended the card for resolutions up to 1680x1050 (22’’ monitors). The GPU of the card did arrive with the Oland code name, sporting 1040 million transistors, 384 stream processors, 24 texture units and 8 ROPs, the same as with the card we are reviewing today. Even the frequencies for the GPU and memory have been left at the same values, the only difference being that this new card does feature double the RAM buffer (2GB) and comes in a Low Profile format so it would also fit in smaller enclosures. The card is shipped in a cardboard enclosure with the updated HIS design, showing the supported technologies via logos on the frontal area:

 

 

 

If we do look a bit on the side, we will be instructed by the manufacturer that this card is compatible only with PCIe connectors:

 

 

Nearby HIS does advertise the iCooler cooling solution (which is not present on this version), along with the total RAM quantity and the supported PCI-Express version:

 

 

This is not all! We will also get a list of box contents:

 

 

On the back side of the box, HIS does explain the benefits of the new AMD Radeon technologies, including the full list of product features and system requirements:

 

 

The inside contents borrow the design elements we have also seen with the previously tested HIS R7 360 GREEN iCooler OC card:

 

 

As bundle, we have received one multi-language Installation Guide along with the disk with drivers:

 

 

The card was carefully wrapped inside a black bubble-bag:

 

 

 

Here is a look at the R7 250 LP card; we can clearly see the half-width PCB with the two-slot cooling system attached to the board, while the VGA port is linked to the I/O shield via a separate cable:

 

 

 

The HIS cooling solutions we have checked in the past for low-end cards were mostly composed from a single fan and a large heatsink; this time we have a twin solution with tiny 7-blade fans blowing cold air on the aluminum fins, in order to keep the GPU cool at all times. Our expectations that this type of cooling would be a bit noisier has proven as true, since the small fans can be clearly heard from inside the case (a small buzzing noise) during normal operation:

 

 

 

A view of the board from the lateral does show us the top plastic shroud which helps concentrate the air flow in specific areas; the aluminum heatsink does also have a factory code printed on it:

 

 

 

 

It seems that no matter the performance segment of the card, HIS does not skimp on quality and we can also see here the matte black PCB with rounded edges:

 

 

 

On the back side of the card we can see the heatsink mounting screws, but also two of the four memory chips:

 

 

 

The memory chips are manufactured by ELPIDA, sporting the W4032BABG 50-F code name; these were designed to operate at 1250 MHz, with a voltage of 1.5 V:

 

 

 

By simply removing the spring-loaded screws, we will be able to remove the cooling system in order to have access to the frontal area of the PCB:

 

 

 

 

Near the I/O ports, we do have the GPU VRM components, which is not passively cooled:

 

 

 

To the back of the card we do have the memory VRM along with the two-pin fan header; the rest of the memory chips are nearby:

 

 

 

In the middle we do have the Oland tiny GPU, manufactured on 28nm:

 

 

 

Here is also a look at the back of the cooling system assembly; we can see that it was mainly designed to have direct contact with the GPU and on the laterals the cold air would blow on the VRM components. In order to avoid scratches on the PCB, HIS has also used some rubber spacers in each corner, where the mounting screws do get installed:

 

 

Regarding I/O connectors, the board does feature one available VGA port, one HDMI but also one DVI:

 

 

Test Setup

 

CPU: Intel I5 4690K Retail @ 4.6GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX

Motherboard: BIOSTAR Z97X Gaming

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: Currently reviewed card

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB + OCZ Vertex 460

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

With the help of the GPU-Z utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:

 

 

To receive more in-depth information regarding the GPU, we have used the AIDA64 utility:

 

 

 

 

Temperature tests:

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 the 1920x1080 resolution for an additional 10 to 15 minutes, with details at Maximum and Tesselation set to Extreme. During this time, the ambient temperature was held steady at 18.9 degrees Celsius:

 

 

Noise measurements

Regular noise measurements were not possible with this board because we did not have access to the RPM readings:

 

3DMark 11

 

3DMark 11 is a DirectX 11 video card benchmark test for measuring your PC's gaming performance. 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of DirectX 11 features including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 consistently and reliably tests your PC's DirectX 11 performance under game-like loads.

 

 

3DMark 2013

 

3DMark includes everything you need to benchmark your hardware in one app. Whether you're gaming on a smart phone, tablet, notebook, laptop, desktop, or a high performance gaming PC, 3DMark includes a benchmark designed specifically for your type of device. And it's not just for Windows. You can compare your scores with Android and iOS devices too. It's the best 3DMark we've ever created.

 

 

Unigine Heaven 4.0

 

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system's potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms, such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

 

 

Hitman Absolution

 

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth video game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth installment in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive's proprietary Glacier 2 game engine.

 

 

DIRT: Rally V0.5

 

Dirt Rally is a racing video game developed and published by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows. An early access version of the game was released on 27 April 2015, via digital distribution service Steam.

 

 

Sleeping Dogs

 

Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure video game developed by United Front Games and Square Enix London. It was published by Square Enix and Bandai Namco Games for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles.

 

 

Tomb Raider

 

Tomb Raider is a media franchise that began as a video game series and includes comic books, novels, theme park rides, and movies, centering around the adventures of the British archaeologist Lara Croft.

 

 

Sniper Elite III

 

Sniper Elite III is a tactical shooter video game developed by Rebellion Developments and published by 505 Games for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

 

 

Metro Last Light

 

Metro: Last Light is a single-player post-apocalyptic-themed first-person shooter video game with stealth and survival horror elements, developed by Ukrainian studio 4A Games and published by Deep Silver.

 

 

Bioshock Infinite

 

BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games and published by 2K Games.

 

 

Crysis 2

 

Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts and released in North America, Australia and Europe in March 2011 for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

 

 

Batman Arhkam Origins

 

Batman: Arkham Origins is a 2013 action-adventure video game developed by Warner Bros. Games Montréal and released by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and the PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 video game consoles.

 

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor

 

Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is an open world action-adventure video game set within Tolkien's legendarium, developed by Monolith Productions and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment.

 

 

Alien: Isolation

 

Alien: Isolation is a first-person survival horror stealth video game developed by The Creative Assembly and published by Sega.

 

 

GRID Autosport

 

Grid Autosport is a racing video game released by Codemasters for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on 24 June 2014 in North America and 27 June 2014 in Europe.

 

 

People which do have really old or discontinued video cards and do want to spend only a small fraction of money on upgrades can look at the R7 250 LP video card from HIS as one of the solutions which does now come with 2GB of GDDR5 memory buffer. In terms of performance, we would rather recommend the card for 1280x1024 or 1680x1050 resolutions, the latter while using low to medium details in games so we won’t get choppy framerates. While the card does feature the same clocks as the one we have reviewed back in 2013, we could overclock it quite a bit in order to surpass performance levels of older Radeon HD 7750 video cards.

 

In order to try out how much the card can go further regarding GPU/memory clocks, we have adjusted it in small increments and tested stability for full runs of the 3DMark11 benchmark; when the card has proven itself unstable, we went back 5MHz so we have succeeded to reach about 1180MHz on the GPU and 1200MHz on the memory. An extra run of 3DMark 2013 was performed afterwards to check if any artifacts would show up:

 

 

click to enlarge

 

We really appreciate HIS efforts again on producing a new LP video card with an older GPU but at the same time we would like to note two negative points with this specific product: the fans are not that silent since their buzz can be clearly heard even in IDLE states and we were missing the LP I/O shield which is really handy when we are using the card in smaller enclosures.

Later edit: HIS has just confirmed that only out sample was shipped with the LP I/O shield missing and that for retail they have all cards featured with this component, so it can be considered as a non-issue.

The R7 250 Twin Cooler LP video card can be found online for about 83 Euros which is on-par with the offerings from other manufacturers.

HIS R7 250 Twin Fan 2GB D5 LP Video Card is Recommended For:

 

 

We would like to thank again to HIS for making this review possible!