PowerColor Radeon R7 360 2GB GDDR5 Graphics Card in Singapore

What is the AMD Radeon R7 360?

The latest graphics card from AMD is the most affordable I’ve seen from its 300-series of parts. At just £84, it costs less than anything that’s recently been released by either AMD or Nvidia.

That makes the R7 360 suitable for gamers wanting to play titles at 1080p, but without forking out more than £100. AMD also says it’s suitable for MOBA players who want to game with settings beyond what any integrated core can offer.

AMD Radeon R7 360 – Under the Hood

This is one of AMD’s cheapest discrete cards, so the firm has recycled and boosted an older part to create the R7 360.

The core used here is called Tobago, but underneath it is the Bonaire GPU used in the older R7 260 and R7 260X cards. The full-fat Bonaire core has 14 compute units with 896 stream processors, which AMD had cut down to 12 units and 768 stream processors for the R7 260. It’s done the same here, with 12 compute units used to form the R7 360.

AMD Radeon R7 360

The core might be the same, but AMD has given the R7 360 a little boost with clock tweaks across the board. The revised 1,050MHz core is 50MHz quicker than last year’s card, and the 2GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 6,500MHz – an improvement of 500MHz on last year.

It’s a modest card, with several board partner versions barely any longer than a PCI Express x16 slot. This makes the R7 360 ideal for smaller cases. In addition, the card requires only one six-pin power connector, which means it’ll be compatible with a greater number of power supplies.

The R7 360 has strong competition, however. Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 750 is available in only a couple of variants but costs a tempting £95. The GeForce GTX 750 Ti has been around longer, which means a bigger selection of cards is available, 

(Temp) Affiliate Test Div

AMD Radeon R7 360 – Results Analysis

The R7 360 is a budget card designed for 1080p playback and smooth gameplay in less demanding titles. This was seen out in the benchmarks, where it struggled to run some games with smooth frame rates.

GCN Architecture
A new design for AMD's unified graphics processing and compute cores that allows them to achieve higher utilization for improved performance and efficiency.

AMD App Acceleration
AMD App Accelerator creates a "co-processing" environment in which the compute processing potential in your AMD Radeon Graphics processor works together with the system central processor, to accelerate enabled applications.

AMD HD3D Technology
Supports the latest stereoscopic 3D content and display technologies
Play 3D games, watch Blu-ray 3D videos and edit 3D photos on your 3D Monitors, TV, or projector.

AMD PowerTune Technology
Maximizes performance under load conditions by dynamically increasing the GPU engine clock to take advantage of unused TDP headroom. Also allows users to configure their own TDP limit, within a provided range, for even higher performance or more power efficiency.

Microsoft DirectX 12
Get intense gaming performance and unrivaled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting, and lifelike imagery.

TRUE AUDIO TECHNOLOGY
True to life echoes, convolution reverbs and fuller sounding environments with increased voices and audio objects deliver a richer and more immersive gaming soundscape.

Vulkan
Next-generation API support for high-performance real-time graphics. Taking the best and brightest parts of Mantle to serve as its foundation, Vulkan is going to be one new and uniquely powerful graphics API.

Mantle API
Properly enabled games will reach new heights of performance by speaking the language of Graphics Core Next.

Frame Rate Targeting Control
Fine-tune your graphics with real-time frame rate control by targeting a frame rate during gameplay, reducing GPU power consumption.

UEFI Support
Better security by helping protect the pre-startup—or pre-boot—process against bootkit attacks and faster startup times and resuming from hibernation.