After initially missing their planned availability window of late February, AMD sends word this evening that the first Radeon R7 265 SKUs have finally reached North American retailers.

Sapphire’s R7 265 Dual-X, which we reviewed back on February 13th, is the first SKU to hit Newegg. This is a reference clocked model with 2GB of VRAM, utilizing Sapphire’s tried-and-true Dual-X cooler.

AMD GPU Specification Comparison
  AMD Radeon R9 270 AMD Radeon R7 265 AMD Radeon R7 260X AMD Radeon R7 260
Stream Processors 1280 1024 896 768
Texture Units 80 64 56 48
ROPs 32 32 16 16
Core Clock 900MHz 900MHz N/A N/A
Boost Clock 925MHz 925MHz 1100MHz 1000MHz
Memory Clock 5.6GHz GDDR5 5.6GHz GDDR5 6.5GHz GDDR5 6GHz GDDR5
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 128-bit 128-bit
VRAM 2GB 2GB 2GB 1GB
FP64 1/16 1/16 1/16 1/16
TrueAudio N N Y Y
Transistor Count 2.8B 2.8B 2.08B 2.08B
Typical Board Power 150W 150W 115W 95W
Manufacturing Process TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm TSMC 28nm
Architecture GCN 1.0 GCN 1.0 GCN 1.1 GCN 1.1
GPU Pitcairn Pitcairn Bonaire Bonaire
Launch Date 11/13/13 03/05/14 10/11/13 01/14/14
Launch Price $179 $149 $139 $109

Meanwhile, to our amazement the card is listed at $149 – AMD’s MSRP – rather than retailing at a higher price. Between bitcoin miners and the tendency for recently launched products to retail $10 or so above MSRP, we weren’t expecting to see 265 hit shelves at MSRP for any period of time, so this comes as a pleasant surprise. Though we’ll still be keeping an eye on prices since it remains to be seen whether these prices will hold.

With this launch AMD’s counter to NVIDIA’s recently launched GeForce GTX 750 Ti is finally on the market. As we saw in our review of that card, AMD and NVIDIA have taken widely divergent paths at $149, so each product will have its strengths and weaknesses. The R7 265 cannot match the GTX 750 Ti’s sub-75W power usage (or overall power efficiency), but it does offer better performance, beating the GTX 750 Ti by around 19%.

Source: AMD

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  • RaistlinZ - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link

    Better grab one while it's still at MSRP. Cheapest price for an R9 270 in stock is $229.99. I don't doubt the R7 265 will also creep up from $150.00 once the initial batch sells out.
  • JDG1980 - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link

    Aaaaannnnnd it's gone. Big surprise...
  • Alexvrb - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    No doubt! It does represent a pretty good value for a budget gaming rig. Err, or it did until they sold out. Hopefully for those interested more will ship out shortly.
  • Shrogadunter - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Went to add it to my cart and it decided to become imaginary....
  • fuminers - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Its sad that we have to rush to buy these GPUs, not because you want to be the first owner anymore its because if you miss a second you might end up paying a lot more than what you should be paying. LTcoin mining has become a huge problem for us gamers.
  • Aknosis - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Just wait till the boom is over, the market will be flooded with 2nd hand GPUs that will either be super cheap or may effect enough of the market to actually lower the prices at the retailers.
  • bendermichaelr - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Yeah but who wants a GPU that's already 90% through it's useful life because of being run 24/7
  • Magichands8 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Don't worry, it won't be a big problem for much longer. People are buying thousands of the new ASICS for scrypt mining. It's now possible to get a setup that churns out 3mh/s for on the order of $2,500 and 100 watts. When the difficulty goes through the roof it's going to bork the whole GPU mining craze and we'll have plenty of cards available. I just hope that Sapphire waits a little longer to release it's newer R9 290X's.
  • extide - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Link to such scrypt asics?
  • Magichands8 - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    Here's his main thread (asiabtc/Jack):

    https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421921.0

    And the main Gridseed asic site:

    http://www.gridseed.com/main.php

    Search terms like LightningASIC, unicorn hasher, Gridseed 5... Google is your lover. Cost per 100kh/s should drop below $100 with the new firmware that's available. There's also a company called ZoomHash out in California which supplies the Gridseed's stateside.

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