Radeon R7 240 And 250: Our Sub-$100 Gaming Card Round-Up

When It Comes To Graphics, $100 Goes A Long Way

I want to start by issuing a bit of guidance to budget-driven gamers: if there are DDR3- and GDDR5-based versions of a given card available, always snag the board with GDDR5 memory. In pretty much every case, you'll get a ton more memory bandwidth, which is a limited resource in the sub-$100 space, especially as you increase resolution. The reason I say anything at all is because there are Radeon HD 7750 and R7 250 cards with DDR3, and you want to avoid them completely.

Before we formulate our conclusions, take a look at game performance in the following chart. The red bar denotes our measurements at low-detail settings, while the black bar indicates what we saw at more demanding presets and 1920x1080. Everything is relative to the Radeon HD 6670 DDR3.

How about the recently-introduced Radeon R7 240? With performance a few points higher than the Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 at playable low detail settings, and a price that averages a bit lower, AMD's latest looks better than we assumed it would based on specifications alone. It's actually surprisingly nimble for a board with only 320 shaders. Paying around $70 seems acceptable, though we wish it were a few bucks cheaper to stand out more prominently from Nvidia's superior GeForce GT 640.

We're more impressed with the Radeon R7 250. Its 200 MHz core clock advantage really distinguishes it from the Radeon HD 6670 GDDR5 and 7730 GDDR5, approaching the performance of AMD's Radeon HD 7750. Does that make it a great buy? It's hard to say; this is where the market gets a little complicated. Boards priced under $100 can change prices quickly. For example, the average cost of a Radeon HD 7750 and 7770 is up about $10 since I started writing this piece. Additionally, we know that the Radeon R7 260 is about to surface for roughly $110. And last, we anticipate the Radeon HD 6670, 7750, and 7770 disappearing soon to make way for the R7 240, 250, and 260.

The more important point to make is that AMD's Radeon HD 7770 is very fast for the $100 it's still selling for. It never dropped below 30 FPS, even in our higher-detail 1920x1080 testing. Given the relatively tame premium, does it make sense to spend $90 or even $70 for a significantly slower card? Our chart suggests not.

Then again, a low-cost Radeon R7 240 manages playable performance at 1920x1080 in some games, so long as you're willing to except the lowest-quality settings available. That doesn't mean a modern game is going to look bad, per se. A lot of these titles actually look pretty good. And it's significant that at 1280x720, a resolution even the Xbox One is forced to contend with on occasion, all of the games we tested are playable on the Radeon R7 240.

At the end of the day, though, the existence of a $100 Radeon HD 7770 makes it extremely hard to recommend any alternative under it, since performance drops much faster than price. Until the 7770 disappears, giving way to the more expensive Radeon R7 260, we have to endorse it above everything else. And if price is your number-one priority, the Radeon R7 240 is as low as you should consider going. Every $10 you spend beyond that card's price should yield more than your money's worth in average performance.

  • Hazly1979
    This card is slower than HD 7750AMD is playing now for sub par $100

    Watch the language - G
    Reply
  • emad_ramlawi
    No need to read the review, those parts are HD 7750 or the new Nvidia GTX 750 for the WIN

    Watch the language - G
    Reply
  • blackmagnum
    Just buy a bigger PSU and be done with these poor performance-for-the-dollar/watt cards.
    Reply
  • tridon
    These discrete cards that squeeze frames out with very little power drain are great. I recently bought one such cheap AMD-card for my fiancée when she wanted to play Guild Wars 2 with me. Having an aging low cost workstation with a weak power supply "Made in Hell", cards like these were the only option. At least without having to upgrade and tweak other parts of the PC. (Yes I'm lazy ).Don Woligroski: For the few(?) that are in the same situation as me it would be great to se an efficiency chart. Like average frames pr. average watt usage through a benchmark, or something in that vein.
    Reply
  • Martell1977
    My brother has a HP s3500f slimline computer that I thought the R7 240 might work well in (at least better than the Geforce 6150se it has now). Problem is he has a 250w PSU, all the R7 240's list 400w minimum and it seems the only place to get one under $75 is eBay($43, new). 400w seems awfully high for such a low end card...
    Reply
  • cleeve
    12559832 said:
    My brother has a HP s3500f slimline computer that I thought the R7 240 might work well in (at least better than the Geforce 6150se it has now). Problem is he has a 250w PSU, all the R7 240's list 400w minimum and it seems the only place to get one under $75 is eBay($43, new). 400w seems awfully high for such a low end card...

    A 400W is overkill if you're running a power-efficient CPU.

    Look at the results, the most this system puilled with the R7 240 is 122 Watts under load. That's the whole system, with an overclocked Core i5-2500K!

    A good 250W PSU should be fine. AMD is kind of recommending overkill here, but they do that to protect people from poor quality PSUs. A 250W HP shouldn't be a problem as long as the platform isn't power hungry.
    Reply
  • cats_Paw
    Cleeve.... not true:http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_hd_7750_and_7770_review,7.htmlA stressed 7770 Requires at least a 400W good PSU (Note that 400W DOES NOT mean 400W on the 12V rail, but 400W in total. If you do that math in a 250W supply you get a lot less power on the 12V rail, who knows maybe 170... Also remmber that the GPU needs a fixed amount of power in a defined amount of cables. This means that if the PSU is not good, it wont be able to juice the GPU well enought).
    Reply
  • Sakkura
    In Metro: Last Light, the GT 640 gets exactly the same FPS and frame time variance at both 720p and 1080p. It looks like you accidentally input the data from one benchmark run in both places.

    *EDIT BY EDITOR*

    You're absolutely right! We fixed the charts, thanks for catching that!
    Reply
  • Sakkura
    12560307 said:
    Cleeve.... not true:http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_hd_7750_and_7770_review,7.htmlA stressed 7770 Requires at least a 400W good PSU (Note that 400W DOES NOT mean 400W on the 12V rail, but 400W in total. If you do that math in a 250W supply you get a lot less power on the 12V rail, who knows maybe 170... Also remmber that the GPU needs a fixed amount of power in a defined amount of cables. This means that if the PSU is not good, it wont be able to juice the GPU well enought).
    A good 250W power supply will have 18-20 amps on the 12V rail, which is fine for the R7 240.

    I don't know why you bring up the 7770, it clearly draws a lot more power than the R7 240.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    Where do you get that 400W figure from that Guru3D article? The highest measured figure in there says: "System Wattage with GPU in FULL Stress = 231W" and further down they say they estimate the board's power to max out at ~86W which is just above 7A.That would be power measured at the wall which includes PSU losses... and their test system includes water pump for their OC'd i7-965, cold-cathode lighting and a bunch of other unnecessary stuff most low-end systems would not have that brings their idle power up to a whopping 155W instead of the 50-80W range for typical for current Intel-based mainstream setups.
    Reply