Both cards are easily below 70C, with the more powerful R7 265 easily dropping to 55C due to its larger cooler. With both of today’s cards being low power open air cooled dual fan cards, there’s little concern for temperatures. At 29C for the R7 265 and 31C for the R7 260 both cards do well enough, but they can’t touch the near room temperature operating temperatures of some of the NVIDIA 650 cards. Moving on to temperatures, our idle temperatures are unremarkable.

At 189W the R7 260 is virtually tied with the less powerful 250X, underscoring Bonaire’s greater efficiency and improved power throttling mechanisms, while the 235W R7 265 once again slots in between the R7 260X and R9 270 by several watts in each direction. Under FurMark we do see some shifts in relative power consumption, though not relative rankings. At the same time we can see just how close the R7 265 and GTX 660 are – separated by just 4W – which goes hand-in-hand with their similar performance. Otherwise for the R7 265, we can see that power consumption slots in above the 7850 and R7 260X, and below the R9 270 by 9W, the kind of very limited change we were expecting. More interesting is that it’s drawing 26W at the wall less than the R7 260X, showcasing that AMD’s power numbers for these cards were in fact almost spot on, especially after accounting for the change in CPU power consumption. The R7 260 for its part draws 196W at the wall, 15W-23W more than the R7 250X and GTX 650 cards it clearly outclasses, and 5W more than the GTX 650 Ti that it still manages to consistently beat. Power consumption under Crysis 3 closely mirrors relative performance, at least for our current-generation 28nm cards. With idle power consumption as good as it is for both AMD and NVIDIA, further improvements are relatively marginal by desktop standards and are essentially drowned out by the large PSU in our GPU testbed. Starting as always with idle power consumption, we can see that all of our low-end cards are tightly clustered. Neither card has difficulty maintaining its top clockspeed for their entire runs, this owing in large part due to the fact that they’re not under any significant thermal load that would require pulling back. Looking briefly at average clockspeeds, despite the fact that these cards implement different power control mechanisms – PowerTune Boost 1.0 and PowerTune Boost 2.0 respectively – the end results are the same.

Amd radeon r7 m260 vs. r9 270