Asus AMD Radeon R7 250X Graphics Card (2GB, GDDR5, PCI Express 3.0)

I also have a sapphire r7 250 but the asus is vastly superiior no question of it only problem is that they don't xFire so I've emailed asus to see if they can be and if they get back to me I'll get back to you.Asus haven't responded yet but I think the truth is that they won't ever xfire with other manufacturer's versions of the same radeon. The reason being that they are 20% higher quality. I flashed the sapphire with the asus rom but it didn't work. I then thought to try a 250x rom on the sapphire which bricked it so that is a £60 lesson right there. I am going to give it away on some geek forum to whoever can recover it. I think when you get down to soldering pins, it's game over. I couldn't get atiflash 309 to load in dos I had problems with freedos booting into a command prompt because I wasn't sure what drive it wanted to install into the drive letters got all scrambled and it saw my usb drive as c: so I was wondering if I wouldn't accidentally overwrite my windows boot sector or something ridiculous anyway the bottom line is I had a lot of problems with the sapphire once I started trying to muck about with the rom and it's now beyond practical use. I can't make heads or tails of the wittering on the geek forums there isn't anything specific to the precise problem I'm having, win 10 is new, ppl were recovering older cards by booting into dos in windows 7&8 well anyway it's right pickle so basically my advice isIf you have a sapphire get another sapphire. If you have an asus get another asus if you want to xfire. Better still save your 2x price of this and get a 1x price of next gen and xfire that in a year or two.It's a nice card but why the long winded comment?Asus just got back to me and said you can't they must be identical gpu's to xfire they do not recommend anything else.AMD just got back to me and also said they only recommend to xFire 2 identical gpu's of the same series from the same manufacturer.I just got the second one and it xFired up straight away no hassles. I have room for 2 more some day, maybe.Hmm well after a bit of use in xFire configuration I'd say I wish I'd bought one r7 or r9 3xx but it's done now & I could see what happens if I put a 3rd one in. I also took the heatsink off, removed the thermal material from the factory, and replaced it with MX-2 on one card and thermal epoxy on the other. Interesting opportunity to compare the peformance of some thermal compounds. So on the MX-2 card it idles at 28c (just running windows) and tends to peak at around 50c. With the stock heat compound it was peaking at 74c. Thus by applying some MX-2 the card runs 24c cooler. On the card with the thermal epoxy, it runs 28c idle (just running windows) and peaks at about 50-59c depending on the game and settings I'm using which is also down from the high 70's.(c) so just by changing the thermal compound you can improve the thermals to some extent. I overclocked them to 1195 (from 1150) memory bus and 1095 cpu (from 1050) but 1200 & 1100 overclock (maximum) seemed to cause texture problems with some games..The thermal perfomance also improved to the extent that in open hardware monitor the gap between the average temperature and the peak temperature closed to zero after applying better thermal materials between the gpu & it's heatsink. That just means that when the board is averaging at say 51c (down from 74) the peak temp is also 51c. Where with the factory thermal compound there is always a 25c gap between the average and peak temp. So it improves mightily to dab some new different & better thermal compound between the gpu & heatsink after cleaning off the old of course. I also added some ram heatsinks for the 2 memory chips that are not obscured by the cental heatsink and a couple of thin copper shims I stuck with thermal epoxy to the other 2 ram chips that are otherwise obscured & coverd by the central heatsink. There are situations where this can help the card such as if the fan dies eventually some day or you forget to switch off ulps in crossfire mode and there is a thermal overload on the secondary or tertiary cards.Also when I overclocked my CPU at the same time I got a lot of system lock ups but I would probably have to read up on fine tuning the cpu overclock on my board because it can auto overclock to 4.5ghz (amdfx4350) but some games lock up and the cpu freezes (not thermally I mean it stops under heavy load at that speed). It all works normally and reliably in my view, at the standard from the factory clock settings but, overall my conclusion is this card isn't as powerful as I first thought, somehow I got the wrong impression but I think for me the issue was that the industry had accelerated recently & I should have read up on it a bit more really. It wasn't a bad plan, to buy one, wait a bit and xFire it but if I hadn't have got the compatibility details wrong I probably wouldn't be ruffled about it. My recommendation goes to buying something a bit more powerful, that has more than 1000 stream processors & at least 2gb of ddr5 (not ddr3) memory. It is better to buy one more powerful card than two weaker ones and xFire them. The market on GPu 's seems to be a bit broken at the moment & check warehouse details you should aim to spend about £100 as some cards with lower specs are selling at the same price as higher spec cards & vice versa. It's a bit of a headache but I have settled for an r7 370 which seems to have a bit more kick.

This review is for Asus AMD R7 240 2GB Graphics Card.I have a HP Media Centre M7630.uk which is from 2006 some 11 years old, Intel Core 2 DUO E6700 CPU, with PCIE 2.0 x16 slot, Windows 10, 32 bit and 450w PSU and ASUS Basswood motherboard. I had a fair bit of trouble finding a graphics card that was compatible with the Legacy BIOS on the PC and any customisation that HP may have done on the BIOS and motherboard. After upgrading to Windows 10 and trying a few cards which had various problems with them including TDR error, Video crashes as well as wireless keyboard not working properly. I have finally managed to get a card that works straight out of the box.I use the PC for Office and video steaming as well as occasional video editing but no games. The card is quiet and I cannot really hear the fan as I am fussy about having any noise that can be avoided, and it runs at a cool 41C. I use it to display on a 24’’ TV screen at 1080p with no problems. A good test is to use HD full screen speech to verify sound synch and quality of video. I uninstalled old Video drivers using DDU program, having previously downloaded latest drivers from Asus website. Then I used Device Manager and right click on display card to navigate to where I had unzipped the new driver and the card was up and running with none of the bloatware associated with AMD software. I would recommend the card and for me its backward compatible with my PCIE 2 x16 and old legacy Bios, runs quite, easy to get running for what it’s sold as I could not find a reason to deduct a star.Update – I have now had the card working for over a year. I use my PC every day and power off when not in use – so the card has been powered up and down numerous times. It has been rock solid with no issues whatsoever and has been working flawlessly.

Great value for money card and a massive upgrade from my old NVidia GTX120. My PC is pretty old so only has a PCI-E 2.0 slot, but this card slots in fine and runs without any problems or the need for attaching cables. Installation was pretty simple as I watched a 'how to' on YouTube beforehand and there are a few of them for this particular model and my particular PC (HP Pavillion). I'm running Vista Home Premium 32-bit and the supplied software on disc didn't include up-to-date drivers, I got the updated versions by downloading the relevant Catalyst software from Radeon's support website directly.Included on the supplied disc are ASUS Tweak which allow you to change card settings and overclock on the fly, as well as Streaming software to let you stream your gameplay live, both bits of software will probably go unused by me but obviously will be very handy to more technically-minded users.Now I can run pretty much any modern title up to and including GTA IV, all my older titles like Diablo III, Guild Wars 2 and Eve Online have received a significant performance and visual boost, my only limitations are the rest of my PC rig (Ram, OS, CPU and CPU Speed) which would all need to be upgraded to handle something like GTA V, for example. I'm a relatively casual PC gamer (I'm normally on a PS4 but I'm going through an Eve Online fixation at present) but I'd expect this card could handle most titles thrown at it over the next couple of years albeit if you want ultra settings you're going to have to get something more modern and more powerful.Overall I'm delighted, for a small outlay of £58 I've put off having to replace my entire rig for another couple of years at least and can start delving into my back catalogue of Steam games knowing that they'll run a lot better now than they would have otherwise.