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Today AMD is releasing their Radeon R9 270X and Radeon R7 260X graphics cards, the first of the new Rx 200 series. Although the names are very different to what we have become use to from AMD the cards aren’t all that new. In fact both are re-branded versions of cards from the Radeon HD 7000 series. With that being the case we want to find out what was new...
In previous years we have seen a new GPU generation released once every year which makes the Radeon HD 7000 shelf life quite surprising. The Radeon HD 7970 was released way back in January of 2012 using the 40nm Tahiti XT architecture. That year saw well over half a dozen more HD 7000 series graphics cards released by AMD. So far this year we have seen the arrival of the budget oriented Radeon HD 7790 in March, followed by the extreme HT 7990 in April. Fast forward to the present and it has almost been 2 years since AMD released the first Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card without a successor. That is until now, as they prepare to unleash the RX 200 series, codenamed Volcanic Islands.
AMD has done away with the ‘HD’ naming scheme that they have used for the past 6 years and replaced it with something a bit more complex. The RX 200 series will consist of the Radeon R7 240, R7 250, R7 260X, R9 270X, R9 280X and later this month the R9 290 and R9 290X. Confused yet? Well let us try and clear a few things up. Helping to simplify things AMD has simply rebadged half of these cards from existing Radeon HD 7000 series products. This is quite a disappointing discovery but not entirely surprising. The Radeon R7 240 is an overclocked version of the Radeon HD 7510 which was an OEM only part from the 7000 series. The R7 250 is a new product that sits between the HD 7510 and HD 7570 (another OEM only part) in terms of specifications. Both are much slower than the Radeon HD 7750 so shouldn’t be considered as gaming options. The R7 260X is a rebadged Radeon HD 7790 that has been overclocked with cards running up to 1.1GHz opposed to the 1GHz clock speed of the 7790. Jumping up in speed we have the R9 270X which is a rebadged Radeon HD 7870. Finally the only other card we can talk about is the R9 280X, though for some reason AMD has restricted us from showing you the performance of this part for a few more days. Though we are not entirely sure why, as the R9 280X looks to be a direct copy of the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition. So with almost absolutely nothing new to see here, what’s the point? The specifications just point to rehashed 7000 series parts and, well, so does the pricing. AMD has set the MSRP of the R9 280X at $300, the same price you can get 1GHz 7970 cards for, while the R9 270X is priced at $200, the exact same price as heavily overclocked 7870’s. Meanwhile the R7 260X (rebadged HD 7790) will cost $140, while overclocked HD 7790 cards are currently selling for as little as $120. Therefore it looks like we will have to wait for the R9 290 series before we see anything new from AMD. That said, let’s take a closer look at the Radeon R9 270X and R7 260X... |
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Kev |
Posted on: 10/08/2013 08:46 AM
wow AMD just wow. What is the bloody point of these 'new' cards when they can already be had for the same price? |
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Beta |
Posted on: 10/08/2013 10:42 PM
"Having spent the last 24 hours furiously benchmaking to get this review ready in time for the official launch, as I neared the end it occurred to me that we should have just rebadged our previous Radeon HD 7870 and 7790 reviews." ROLF! |