We are coming back to the Radeon R7 260X with a new card variant from HIS, which sports a more aggressive pricing in order to pick up even more customers which were undecided before. The 260X GPU takes part from the mid-range segment of the latest AMD generation and is built around the Bonaire architecture which was also present on the Radeon HD 7790.

As with the older GPU, we are dealing with 896 Shader Units, the 128-bit memory bus, 16ROPs and the exact same transistor count. On the first HIS 260X variant with dual fans we have experienced the stock clocks as on the AMD OEM for both GPU and memory while with the present card they have decided to downclock the GPU to 1000MHz (from 1100MHz) and the memory to 1250MHz (from 1625MHz). Usually, the lowered memory clocks should not decrease the performance too much but the GPU clock is another story. We will get back to this in a small overclocking test later in the review.

The most interesting feature that was brought with the Bonaire GPU at this price range was TrueAudio function, which is also available on the high-end R9 290 and 290X variants. We can find three DSP cores which are dedicated to the HiFi2 EP Audio and employ Tensilica’s Xtensa ISA. The DSP is fully programmable which is very good for the programmers. Each core comes with 32KB of instruction and data cache along with 8KB of scratch RAM. One fast interface connects the DSPs to 384KB of shared internal memory which is organized in 8KB banks. Also, up to 64MB of buffer is addressable via a low-latency bus interface shared with the display pipeline.

The product packaging is similar to what we have seen with the R7 250X and includes the box-art with a sword, advertisements for the iCooler custom technology, the iTurbo overclocking application but also a small pictogram which shows the total memory quantity:

On the right side of the box we have a listing of inside contents:

The back side is coming with the full list of Product Specifications and System Requirements; here we also have in-depth explanations regarding the GCN Architecture, AMD TrueAudio Technology but also Ultra Resolution Gaming:

After removing the top packaging layer, we will end up with a black box of the same size, which holds the HIS logo in the middle portion:

Besides the card, we will also receive a small envelope with the rest of the bundle:

Speaking of the envelope, this one holds inside an installation disk, one Quick Installation Guide, but also one small HIS case sticker:

The board is held secure inside a transparent plastic mold, with foam material underneath the PCB: