Overall and Final Verdict
The Sapphire R7 260X is an interesting card. Much like the HD 7790 that it is based on, I loved its performance. It isn’t a high end card, but you do get enough power to play any of today’s latest games at a good resolution and in most cases you don’t even have to turn the settings down. The R7 260X outperformed the HD 7790’s due to its increased clock speed and also outperformed the GTX 560 Ti. At its price point not only is it faster than the GTX 650 Ti but it also a little cheaper than most of the GTX 650 Ti’s on the market right now.
What I really like about the 260X is how perfectly it will fit in a budget PC build. Not only is the price right, but with a extremely low power usage you can also save money on a lower wattage PSU. If you pair this up with a lower priced AMD APU you would still get similar performance to what we saw on our test bench as most games aren’t affected by the CPUs performance.
My only complaint about the card really was the odd decision to extend the PCB and the overall card length out for no apparent reason. It won’t hurt performance, but it will mean you won’t be able to fit the 260X into smaller builds. On the plus side, typically budget builds aren’t to small because going with Mini-ITX costs a little more than a normal build.
All in all, the R7 260X is a great card and perfect for a budget build. I was able to put together a full build utilizing the 260X, an AMD A10-6800K, a 2TB hard drive, and 8 gigs of ram for less than $540 that just needs an OS (http://pcpartpicker.com/p/2RWqh).
