Radeon 550 vs R7 250E

Place in the ranking	668	612
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	1.14	4.37
Power efficiency	5.54	7.32
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)	GCN 4.0 (2016−2020)
GPU code name	Cape Verde	Lexa
Market segment	Desktop	Desktop
Release date	20 December 2013 (10 years ago)	20 April 2017 (7 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$109	$79

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

Radeon 550 has 283% better value for money than R7 250E.

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	512	512
Core clock speed	800 MHz	1100 MHz
Boost clock speed	no data	1183 MHz
Number of transistors	1,500 million	2,200 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	14 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	55 Watt	50 Watt
Texture fill rate	25.60	37.86
Floating-point processing power	0.8192 TFLOPS	1.211 TFLOPS
ROPs	16	16
TMUs	32	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 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x8
Length	168 mm	145 mm
Width	1-slot	2-slot
Supplementary power connectors	None	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	GDDR5	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	1 GB	2 GB
Memory bus width	128 Bit	64 Bit
Memory clock speed	1125 MHz	1750 MHz
Memory bandwidth	72 GB/s	56 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	1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort	1x DVI, 1x HDMI 2.0b, 1x DisplayPort 1.4a
HDMI	+	+

API compatibility

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

DirectX	12 (11_1)	12 (12_0)
Shader Model	5.1	6.7
OpenGL	4.6	4.6
OpenCL	1.2	2.1
Vulkan	1.2.131	1.3

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	4.37	5.25
Recency	20 December 2013	20 April 2017
Maximum RAM amount	1 GB	2 GB
Chip lithography	28 nm	14 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	55 Watt	50 Watt

Radeon 550 has a 20.1% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 3 years, a 100% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 100% more advanced lithography process, and 10% lower power consumption.

The Radeon 550 is our recommended choice as it beats the Radeon R7 250E in performance tests.

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