Pros: It's got a very low price for what it puts out - Will run anything very well at 1600x900 at high/max settings, and could likely do decently good at full 1080p as well. As a new release, it's got support for all the new features, including DX11. It's not going to be pumping out constant 60fps, but it rarely, if ever, got below 20-30.

Meanwhile, it keeps very cool - even with my case's bad airflow, it never gets above 62C (CPUID report), and the fan does not seemingly increase in speed at all. It's also an extremely quiet card, benefits from not needing too big of a PSU upgrade, and is also quite compact. For the scenario I'm using the card in - A 4/5 year old former-high-performance DELL studio desktop, used for intermittent gaming while waiting for a new build to come in - this sort of card is absolutely ideal.

Cons: As of today, (13.12 catalysts WHQL) its drivers seem to generate some graphical glitches on DX9 applications, particularly involving models with transparency. (From what I've found, this is actually true for all Radeon HD 7000 series cards - The R7-260x is actually an updated version of the 7790). In this case, it's not Sapphire to blame here, as much as it is AMD and the card's currently quite poor driver support. These sorts of graphical glitches I've also gotten on a Radeon HD 7950 using the 13.11 non-beta drivers.

It also seems like the card has somewhat low endurance - After keeping my computer on for a night of back-ups (clocked in at 16 hours of boot time), attempting to run Team Fortress 2 generated some very bad, intermittent polygon spikes, which disappeared as soon as I rebooted. The card's design might play into this - the fan on the card is always spinning at minimum 20% full speed, even when idle.

Meanwhile, performance on earlier on in the boot seems to yield some slightly laggy model rendering, albeit without any artifact or deformation - sometimes, very infrequently, when entering new areas of a map for example, there will be a short second where the terrain isn't visible. This might be due to the card's low memory streaming rate, or simply slight faults in my card (and maybe drivers as well). In any case, there's a lot that seemingly indicates to me that my R7-260's VRAM is sort of off.

Other Thoughts: Glitches and questionable VRAM aside, it seems to be a solid card, even with its newest drivers (i.e., in my experience, a clean install of the 13.12 catalyst does NOT generate constant crashing).

The games I'm playing being slightly angled towards greater nVidia support might also be skewing my perspective a bit. In my research, it's mostly older games or more obscure games that have generated more strife for this card than anything else.

Pros: Much faster than my HD3770. The 3D Mark 11 score on the 3770 was P2885 while the R7 260x with included driver was P6176 and the R7 260x with the latest beta driver as of 12/13 produced a score of P6248. I love the performance to price ratio, but the con of this card can be a deal breaker.

Cons: The driver on the included CD is a beta driver. I did what most people would do and updated to the latest driver which is still in beta. There are cons with other R7 and R9 cards that you must read for yourself to see if this is for you, but for me this card's driver crashes almost all the time. It does not crash so often to be a serious problem, but could be if I were a gamer and the driver crashed while playing a game. I'd suggest holding out until the first stable driver is released before purchasing.

Other Thoughts: This will be a great card for me once the first stable driver is available for download.

Pros: I've already written a review, but wanted to let people know how to fix driver issues.

Cons: n/a

Other Thoughts: Use the Catalyst Control Center 13.10 released on 11/18/2013. This has solved my driver crashing issue with the beta drivers. Tested on Windows 7 Pro, SP1

Pros: The pros was when it was not crashing with the Adobe flash player giving me a black screen it was on point. It has excellent graphics rendering. Purchased this because of the low power usage compared to the NVIDIA GTX 650 TI boost. Had o RMA with newegg.

AMD FX-6300 Vishera 3.5GHz
CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
GIGABYTE GA-970A-DS3 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
IN WIN GreenMe 650 650W ATX 12V V2.31& EPS 12V 2.92 Version SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply

Cons: Crash crash crash is what I kept getting with the new AMD graphics drivers. Windows 7 action center gave a message of ATI Radeon card stopped working. The video card would completely shut down and give a black screen causing me to have to hard reboot. If I leave the computer unused it would crash and reboot also. I called Sapphire explained the issue, the tech stated it sounds like a bad graphics card and to replace it. New egg responded quickly to this problem and RMA'ed for me. Now have too wait for a new one to be sent. I had to put my Sapphire 7770 GHZ Edition back in it never crashed like the R7 260X. Forgot to mention Mozilla Foxfire 26 with latest Flash would seem to cause this situation with the R7 200 series card.

Other Thoughts: Other thoughts would be maybe this is the only dud out of the lot and the new one being sent will function as designed.

Pros: It looks nice and it fits in the comp case. It is very quiet and runs cool under a load. Excellent graphics rendering for the price. I was thinking about the R9 series but power consumption to much.

Cons: Only con so far is the crashing issue with the AMD 13.11.9.2 catalyst drivers when using adobe flash in Firefox 26 beta. I dont get a blue screen with an error but a black screen with lost signal at time s then it will recover with a message from win 7 stating the graphics drivers have stopped functioning and windows has recovered from this. The card is longer than I imagined but made it fit. Gonna run it five more days before I RMA in case its a hardware issue. Will run some software to test card for defects from file hippo dot com

Pros: Got this card from AMD Fan Event in San Jose, CA. Popped it in and fired up BF3 was getting over 100 FPS on medium, upped it to Ultra and was getting 70 FPS. This is with a APU but not crossfired.

Cons: none so far

Other Thoughts: CPU: A8-6500K
RAM: 6GB DDR3 1600
OS: Win 7 Pro 64x

Pros: Very good quality for the price, runs Final Fantasy 14 very well and most of games I have. Changing settings like fan speed is very easy.

Cons: Issues with drivers at first but that was quickly solved.

Pros: Reasonable price point. Performance is good for the price. Overclocking headroom above the shipped overclock rates. Great little card for the money

Cons: Not the most powerful card, but very competitive for the price range. (Not really a con)