XFX Radeon R7 250 Core Edition Video Card Review

The XFX R7 250 Core Edition (Cont’d)

The XFX R7 250 Core Edition uses a simple cooler with a 50 mm fan. This cooler does not touch the memory chips. As mentioned, the Radeon R7 250 has a TDP of 65 W. The card is 7.0” (178 mm) long.

Figure 5: Cooler removed

The video card uses a voltage regulator with two phases for the GPU and one phase for the memory chips. The voltage regulator circuit uses a digital design and is controlled by an APW7153B chip. All capacitors are solid.

Figure 6: Voltage regulator

The reviewed video card uses four Elpida W2032BBBG-6A-F GDDR5 chips, each one storing 2 Gbits of data, comprising the 1 GiB of memory available on this video card. These chips can run up to 6,000 MHz. On this video card, they are accessed at 4,600 MHz, which means there is a good margin for safely increasing the memory clock.

Figure 7: One of the four memory chips

The only accessories that come with this video card (besides a manual and a driver disc) are two brackets that can be used to install it in low profile cases, shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8: Accessories

Before seeing the performance results, let’s recap the main features of this video card.