Sapphire is a company whose history in the development of the graphics card can be traced back to the turn of the millennium. 2001 saw many an enthusiast drooling over the latest Sapphire release, so we were looking forward to getting into this Radeon R7 240.
The R7 240 from Sapphire features an Oland Pro GPU variant running at a 730MHz core clock speed, with a boost up to 780MHz. The DDR3 4GB memory runs at 900MHz, with the card having a TDP of 30W.
It’s a relatively compact single slot card, measuring 145 x 95 x 15mm, with the design looking rather like an old Voodoo Banshee from some years ago. It’s effective enough and offers VGA, HDMI and single-link DVI outputs. The lack of a huge amount of fans or a larger heatsink doesn’t appear to affect the card too much or create any major overheating problems. However, it did get a little hot to touch after we ran the benchmarks – hotter than the MSI GTX970 at least.
Battlefield 4 at 1920 x 1080 in Ultra settings, managed an average frame-rate of 29. Skyrim as before with ultrasettings and 8x AA scored 31fps. And Watch Dogs at 1080 with the maximum graphical settings scored just 27fps. Moving on to FutureMark’s 3DMark 11, the score of 2,650 isn’t really much to get excited about, especially when compared to the previous graphics card.
While the numbers may not elicit much of a response from the hardcore benchmark fanatic, the cost of the Sapphire R7 240 has to be taken into account. This is a card that costs just £72 – over £200 cheaper than the far more powerful GTX970. For that cost you could potentially get a few of these cards in a triple CrossFire setup.
As a single card, although you’ll be able to play the latest games, you won’t be able to enjoy the highest possible settings without some form of graphical problem. In some ways it all depends on what you want. The GTX970, for example, is more future proof, for quite some time, whereas the R7 240 will find itself unable to cope relatively soon.
On the other hand. For £70, this is a perfectly fine single slot 4GB card. It plays Blu-ray content, streaming HD content and manages higher-end video editing without any hint of a problem.
The only issues we had were the heat build-up during the benchmarks (which could be a concern if the system isn't well ventilated) and the Catalyst Control Centre drivers that refused to be installed a couple of times on our test system. Eventually they installed correctly and everything worked a treat, but someone with lesser computing experience may have trouble.
The Sapphire R7 240 4GB graphics card is therefore good enough for a power user system, and for £72 it’s reasonably priced too. For high-end gaming, though, you’re going to be a little disappointed, and you’ll need to consider spending more for future proofing technologies.