AMD Radeon R7 250 review

The R7 250 is an entry-level Radeon card that doesn’t require extra power connections to work, you just plug into a PCI Express x16 bus socket and it’s ready to go. This makes it ideal for use in PCs with basic power supplies that don’t have PCI Express power connectors. As for display outputs, the R7 250 provides HDMI, DVI and VGA connections, so you shouldn’t have a problem connecting the graphics card to your display.

The R7 250’s graphics processor has 384 stream processors and runs at a clock speed of 1.05GHz. The graphics processor is paired with 1GB of graphics memory running at 1.15GHz. That isn’t a particularly impressive specification, but isn’t too bad if you just want a general-purpose graphics card and don’t intend to play games at optimal quality.

Indeed, the R7 250 produced an average frame rate of just 27.1fps in our Dirt Showdown test at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and with graphics quality set to Ultra, which is too low for truly smooth gameplay. However, reducing graphics quality to High increased the average frame rate to a much smoother and far more playable 47fps.

The R7 250 failed our Crysis 3 benchmark test at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with graphics quality set to High, and reducing graphics quality to Medium only raised the average frame rate to 17.6fps. Given its specification the results aren’t surprising, but when we reduced the resolution to 1,280×720 and graphics quality to Medium the R7 250 produced a much smoother average frame rate of 31.3fps. We think that’s pretty good for a £64 graphics card.

The R7 250’s benchmarks compare well with those of the more expensive Asus GTX 650-E, which, like the R7 250, only requires bus power to run. The GTX 650-E produced an average frame rate of 20fps in our Dirt Showdown test at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 at Ultra quality, which is lower than that of the R7 250. However, the GTX 650-E beat the R7 250 by around 5fps when we reduced the quality levels.

Obviously, everyone would like to play the latest games at the highest settings, but graphics cards that let you do this are out of reach for many people. It’s entirely possible to enjoy Crysis 3 at a resolution of 1,280×720 at Medium quality, so if you have a low-Powered PC or a severely limited budget then the R7 250 could be the graphics card for you. However, we think gamers would be better off paying more for an AMD Radeon R7 260X, if their budget will stretch that far.