Introduction

The sub-$200 market of the past couple years has emerged as AMD's fiefdom. The upper end of the company's Radeon R7 200 series and the Radeon R9 270 series are leading the company's lineup there. But NVIDIA's plans to stir things up with the upcoming GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti have forced AMD into preemptively focusing on this market segment between the $130-ish R7 260X and $180-ish R9 270. A pretty deep gorge if you ignore previous generation options such as the HD 7850 and HD 6870, it calls for a re-branding of the former.

AMD's new Radeon R7 265 is AMD's explanation for giving the R9 270X and R9 270 an identical core configuration of the 28 nm "Pitcairn" silicon, with minor clock-speed differences. The new card has a lot in common with the Radeon HD 7850 from the previous generation in that it features 1,024 of the 1,280 stream processors and just 64 of the 80 TMUs present on the chip. Also featured are 32 ROPs and a 256-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The core is clocked to 925 MHz and the memory runs at 5.60 GHz (GDDR5-effective), both of which are higher than the 860 MHz core and 4.60 GHz memory the HD 7850 originally launched with. At US$149, the R7 265 is AMD's attempt to patch up the gap between the R7 260X and R9 270.

We have with us a Sapphire-branded Radeon R7 265 2 GB graphics card. It is based on the aging HD 7850 Dual-X.