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now i get criticized a fair bit for not really criticizing products enough i
think some people feel and for not looking at lower end products that are
more affordable a lot 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 r7240 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 else's it's just that this
graphics card for 80 dollars 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 i guess is is what it is it's got a heat sink that's like
indicative of how much power you can expect this thing to have and then it's
also got a full-size bracket or you can replace that with two half size 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 disc 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 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 780s or you know r9 290xs you
are similarly getting less for your money that is why graphics cards like
these exist these are the Radeon 7770
and the r7260x 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 um i guess without further ado let's get into the benchmarks so
here's dirt 3. we're running at 1080p so any reasonable gaming experience is
going to be at 1080p these days we're running 4x uh msaa so that's
anti-aliasing and we're running on high or ultra so both of these graphics card
this one for about a hundred dollars 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 meager 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 nine frames
per second nine 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 is probably going to be more like the 7770 which
costs just about 25 more than an r7 240
and performs more than doubly as well delivering a very playable experience
particularly once you turn anti-aliasing 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 tres fx did i say games because i meant graphics cards deliver a
playable experience here averaging 40 to 51 FPS this okay again costs about 25
less than a 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 is
stupid because it just makes for a video where i haven't actually told you
anything useful about what to what to buy um 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 friends 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 out you know what
most onboard graphics that supports all that stuff too these days um and as
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