Radeon R7 250E vs ATI HD 3870 X2

Place in the ranking	916	668
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	0.04	1.14
Power efficiency	0.78	5.54
Architecture	TeraScale (2005−2013)	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)
GPU code name	R680	Cape Verde
Market segment	Desktop	Desktop
Release date	26 January 2008 (16 years ago)	20 December 2013 (10 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$449	$109

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

R7 250E has 2750% better value for money than ATI HD 3870 X2.

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	320	512
Core clock speed	825 MHz	800 MHz
Number of transistors	666 million	1,500 million
Manufacturing process technology	55 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	165 Watt	55 Watt
Texture fill rate	13.20	25.60
Floating-point processing power	0.528 TFLOPS	0.8192 TFLOPS
ROPs	16	16
TMUs	16	32

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	PCIe 2.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	267 mm	168 mm
Width	2-slot	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	1x 6-pin + 1x 8-pin	None

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR3	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	512 MB	1 GB
Memory bus width	256 Bit	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	901 MHz	1125 MHz
Memory bandwidth	57.66 GB/s	72 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors	2x DVI, 1x S-Video	1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort
HDMI	-	+

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	10.1 (10_1)	12 (11_1)
Shader Model	4.1	5.1
OpenGL	3.3	4.6
OpenCL	N/A	1.2
Vulkan	N/A	1.2.131

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	1.84	4.37
Recency	26 January 2008	20 December 2013
Maximum RAM amount	512 MB	1 GB
Chip lithography	55 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	165 Watt	55 Watt

R7 250E has a 137.5% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 5 years, a 100% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 96.4% more advanced lithography process, and 200% lower power consumption.

The Radeon R7 250E is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon HD 3870 X2 in performance tests.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.