AMD Radeon R9 M290X, R7 M265, R5 M230 Laptop Video Cards Unveiled

AMD Radeon R9 M290XAMD has unveiled a trio of laptop-use video cards, namely the Radeon R9 M290X, R7 M265 and R5 M230.

The Radeon R9 M290X is the fastest among them and it’s made for gaming laptops. It’s basically a rebrand of the top-of-the-line Radeon HD 8970M enthusiast GPU, known for its great performance and rivalry against the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M top model, so the R9 M290 should perform equally good. It’ll definitely be among the fastest, if not the fastest, laptop video card for 2014 and will compete against Nvidia’s upcoming GTX 880M. The Radeon GPU provides a compute power of 2,176 GFLOPS and has a 256-bit memory interface and 4GB of GDDR5 video memory. It will be used in the full-blown gaming laptops with big screens, fastest processors, and also high prices starting at aproximatelly $1,300-$1,500.

The 128-bit AMD Radeon R7 M265 with its speed of 557 GFLOPS and 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM is a level lower in the hierarchy and belongs to the mid-range gaming segment. It’s based on the same core technology as the Radeon HD 8700M series from 2013. You can expect it to come incorporated in the full-size entertainment notebooks with $800+ price tags.

Finally, the Radeon R5 M230 is an entry-level dedicated graphics card. It’s based on a new GPU which is similar to the Radeon HD 8500 series. It uses 4GB of DDR3 64-bit memory and delivers a 499.2 GFLOPS compute speed. For comparison’s sake, currently the fastest AMD Radeon integrated GPU, the HD 8650G found in the A10-5750M processor has a speed of 409 GFLOPS. You will be able to find the R5 M230 in the ~$500 mainstream laptops.

“All models come with AMD Enduro technology, that improves power consumption and increases battery life. They also support AMD App Acceleration, by means of which the GPU can be used to boost the overall performance of apps that are written to make use of it. The R7 and R5 models support AMD’s new Mantle API,” CPU World reports.

You can expect them to hit the market very soon.

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