AMD Radeon R7-265 Review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The AMD R7-265 is a fun addition to the Radeon R7 line up, and it is by far the fastest R7 product they have launched to date. But realistically, this card is a Radeon HD 7850 in disguise. The specs are almost similar with the exception beeing a small Boost frequency tweak that allows it to clock towards 925 MHz. So the big question remains, was this card intended to be released? We doubt it and think it was quickly pushed out of the door to be able to compete with NVIDIAs Geforce GTX 750 series in both price and performance. 

Cooling & Noise Levels

Now please understand that we did not receive a reference card today, instead we received a board from Sapphire, as such we can't comment on the reference cooler and its performance. The Sapphire card runs cool, though we see an anomaly as the thermal sensor reports roughly 57 Degrees as maximum through software. Our thermal imaging camera however shows 5 degrees more at 62~63 Degrees C. Make no mistake, the thermal camera is right. So that will be the real temperature, which is still a great temperature.
 

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Power Consumption

The card is rated having a 150 Watt TDP. We measured roughly 145 Watts. If you pursue the multi-GPU road then with two cards we think a 600~700 Watt PSU will be more then sufficient, but do keep in mind to have a bit of reserve. So yeah, it's not great to have a GPU consuming that much power, but it could have been a lot worse.

Game Performance

The AMD R7-265 in most scenarios will be performing close to the GeForce GTX 660, that is a pretty nice sweet spot for just one GPU that comes with a nice price-tag opposed to the competition. Performance wise there will be few games that won't run seriously good at the very best image quality settings when you stick at 1600x1200. At Full HD you'll still be able to achieve very decent framerates with good image quality settings on the majority of games. Hitman Absolution with 40+ FPS at 1920x1200 High quality and 2xMSAA is such an example. That is nice performance for the money.

Overclocking

The BIOS on this card was limited, as such we reached 1050 Mhz as maximum. Memory as well is locked, you'll be able to set it at 4x 1500 Mhz = 6000 Gbps. Still, that is an extra 10% performance free of charge, we like that.
 

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Concluding

Nothing is really new with the R7-265 except maybe it's price performance ratio, which is really good all by itself. See, the AMD Radeon R7 265 will be available late February starting at a price of $149 USD or 109 EUR + VAT. Make no mistake, this card really is the Radeon HD 7850 that has been tweaked a little to offer a hint better performance. But sure, for the money that performance is good, the features very nice, the power consumption is normal and the heat and noise levels are a non-issue (though we did not get to test an actual AMD reference model). We'd recommend the R7-265 to the casual  gamers with a monitor resolution of 1920x1080/1200 as absolute maximum. With the extremely modern games that are heavy on the GPU we do advise to look at something a hint stronger. For the casual gamer we can definitely recommend the product, and yeah... we are curious how the R7-265 will hold ground price/performance wise to the upcoming GeForce GTX 750 series from NVIDIA. And for that review, check in at Guru3D.com back real soon as well, of course.

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