Cooling, Noise, and Power

When you have a card like the XFX R7 250E Core Edition, one of the best features is the possibility that you could just pick it up and add it to any store bought PC that you might have sitting around. To be able to do that it needs to have low power requirements, low thermal requirements, and if you are looking to do it without your parents complaining their PC now making “all kinds of noise” you will need for the card to be quiet. Starting on the power side of things, I knew that the 250E Core Edition didn’t have a power connection so its power requirements aren’t too high, but how did it compare to other cards? Well it came in a little higher than the ultra-efficient GTX 750 Ti’s but it still performed well with a peak of 265 watts being pulled from our whole test bench with the 250E installed and under load. Considering the test bench has a power draining 6 core monster of a CPU and water cooling, this is an impressive number.

For noise testing I ran the card through three tests, once at idle, once at 50% fan speed, and once at 100% fan speed. Between the three we can get a good idea of its fan noise profile. I was a little worried at how well it would perform because single fan designs sometimes run at higher RPM to give even better cooling, XFX obviously didn’t have to do this though. The 250E Core Edition had an impressive idle number but the best was the 100% fan speed number that was actually lower than some of the large cards running at 50% fan speed. The GTX 750 Ti Reference card still performed better, but the next closest card was 3 dB higher.

So it doesn’t pull too much power and it is quiet, does it run hot? Well I ran the 250E Core Edition in Heaven Benchmark 4.0 until its temperature leveled out at 69 degrees. This is basically middle of the pack average. Considering the single slot cooling design it is actually better than I would have expected though!