Radeon R7 250E vs RX 550

Place in the ranking	550	670
Place by popularity	21	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	2.92	1.27
Power efficiency	9.70	5.46
Architecture	GCN 4.0 (2016−2020)	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)
GPU code name	Lexa	Cape Verde
Market segment	Desktop	Desktop
Release date	20 April 2017 (7 years ago)	20 December 2013 (11 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$79	$109

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

RX 550 has 130% 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	1100 MHz	800 MHz
Boost clock speed	1183 MHz	no data
Number of transistors	2,200 million	1,500 million
Manufacturing process technology	14 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	50 Watt	55 Watt
Texture fill rate	37.86	25.60
Floating-point processing power	1.211 TFLOPS	0.8192 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 x8	PCIe 3.0 x16
Length	145 mm	168 mm
Width	2-slot	1-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	4 GB	1 GB
Memory bus width	128 Bit	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	1750 MHz	1125 MHz
Memory bandwidth	112.0 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	1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort	1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x DisplayPort
HDMI	+	+

API compatibility

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

DirectX	12 (12_0)	12 (11_1)
Shader Model	6.4	5.1
OpenGL	4.6	4.6
OpenCL	2.0	1.2
Vulkan	1.2.131	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	7.08	4.38
Recency	20 April 2017	20 December 2013
Maximum RAM amount	4 GB	1 GB
Chip lithography	14 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	50 Watt	55 Watt

RX 550 has a 61.6% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 3 years, a 300% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 100% more advanced lithography process, and 10% lower power consumption.

The Radeon RX 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.