Gadgetory

Corsairs Raptor lion of quality gaming peripherals has the features you need to win at a price you like click now to learn more now I get criticized a fair bid for not really criticizing products enough I think some people feel and for not looking at lower end products that are more affordable out of the time we tend to get really focused on the high end sexy stuff so to address both of those things I'm gonna be taking a look at the r7 240 a product that sucks and is cheap so we're gonna go ahead and take this out of the box to be clear I'm not particularly criticizing msi here there's nothing different about their r7 240 implementation that makes it worse than anyone elses it's just that this graphics card for $80 makes absolutely no sense and nobody should buy it so let's go ahead and have a look at the card itself it has a downward draft cooler which should I guess is what it is it's got a heatsink that's like indicative of how much power you can expect this thing to have and then it's also bought a full-size bracket or you can replace that with two half sized brackets so that you can install it in a low profile case although you won't be having a very satisfactory gaming experience with it anyway it comes with a driver disk and that is pretty much all so I'd like to take a moment to talk about the concept of price to performance yes this is an $80 card but even if it was a $60 card on special promo it still makes absolutely no sense to buy because there are options that cost just a little bit more that deliver so much better performance you see guys there is a sweet spot buying a $500 computer or a $400 computer is not a sweet spot experience you are actually getting less for your money by buying something that is less expensive similarly when you start to spend a fortune on GTX Titans or 780 s or you know r9 290 X's you are similarly getting less for your money that is why graphics cards like these exist these are the Radeon 77 70 and the r7 260x so this is the last gen product so it will tend to be a very good deal and the 260x is a current gen product so it carries a bit of a price premium right now but you can still see that it is a much better value than this so low-end products i guess i'm without further ado let's get into the benchmarks so here's dirt3 we're running at 1080p so any reasonable gaming experience is going to be at 1080p these days we're running 4x on msaa so that's anti-aliasing and we're running on high or ultra so both of these graphics card this one for about $100 and this one for about a hundred and forty dollars run this game very satisfactorily you're having a great gaming experience on our standard test bench this one in spite of having the benefit of using one of the best CPUs available that is overclocked can manage a meagre 18 FPS you will have an even worse experience on your computer this game is not playable at high details at 1080p Far Cry 3 this is more of a hardcore title so we weren't really expecting this to do very well but guys the performance difference here considering the price this gets 28 frames per second this gets 9 frames per second 9 frames per second it is one third the performance and it costs more than half as much that isn't reasonable that doesn't make any sense the sweet spot for this one it's probably gonna be more like the 77 70 which costs just about 25% more than an r7 240 and performs more than double E as well delivering a very playable experience particularly once you turn on ta liasing off even running that game at pretty high settings next up we've got Tomb Raider fairly mainstream title third-person adventure game all that kind of noise so both of these games at Ultra without tress-fx did I say games because I meant graphics cards deliver a playable experience here averaging 42 51 FPS this okay again cost about 25% less than a 77 70 and manages a meager just over one third of the performance this you guys is why I don't focus on low-end stuff and this is why I don't generally make videos about stuff that I think you stupid because it just makes for a video where I haven't actually told you anything useful about what to what to buy I guess I have don't buy low-end junk because it doesn't make sense you're better off saving your pennies for like another couple weeks another couple allowances and getting something that delivers a much much better value that is all my thank you for checking out this unboxing and cautionary tale about the r7 240 I apologize to AMD and MSI for anything that I said that might offend them about this video but let's face it guys low-end cards are stupid and they make no sense and so there you go you should just get something a little bit better and pay a little bit more actually a lot better so deal with it don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have any thoughts to share with me about maybe you think that these make sense I mean they have HDMI so they can carry audio you know what most onboard graphics that supports all that stuff to these days and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos