When choosing a laptop, one of the important factors will be the mobile video card installed on it. Despite the fact that in the vast majority of cases, cards adapted for these purposes are completely inferior to their “colleagues” from computer versions, choosing a more or less acceptable option is not so difficult. Today we will tell you about the AMD Radeon R5 M230 mobile graphics card.
general information
One of the important parameters of any video card in a laptop is its heat dissipation. Indeed, taking into account the fact that in equipment of this type all equipment is located very close, an increase in temperature above the norm can damage the system. And if you prefer to keep the laptop on your lap, you may well get minor burns from a working radiator.
AMD Radeon R5 M230 is based on the 28 nm process technology. This means that it has a certain chip size, which is smaller than the analogs of the same series of computer graphics cards. At the same time, this parameter is quite standard for cards installed on a laptop.
If we talk about the ability to connect multiple monitors, the R5 series does not provide special options. A maximum of 2 screens is all that a user can count on. However, for most office tasks this will be enough. People cope with one monitor.
Specifications
Now let's get down to the AMD Radeon R5 M230 on the technical side. It's no secret that sellers try to write the amount of video card memory on price tags, although this is far from its most important quality.
The AMD Radeon R5 M230 has a GPU clock speed of 855 MHz. This will provide high speed data transfer from the board to the central processor. Which is pretty good, considering that the analogue (AMD Radeon R5 230 is a video card for PC), this parameter is only 625 MHz.
At the same time, up to 4 GB of DDR3 format memory can be installed on this video card, depending on the manufacturer. Accordingly, the maximum clock frequency will depend on this. For this outdated memory format, this value is 1000 MHz.
In general, the totality of all these parameters provides a video memory bandwidth of 16 GB / s. And here AMD Radeon R5 M230, the characteristics of which we examined, was a great disappointment. Any other features of the video card are useless if they are not able to organize a workable system.
Maths
Finally we got to the computing units. There are only 5 in this video card. Considering that each of them consists of 64 shaders (stream processors), in total we get 320 computational elements. For a gaming video card this is unacceptably small, but if you plan to use a laptop for multimedia purposes, then it will work fine.
In general, this dimension allows the hardware to support shaders version 5.0, DirectX 12.0 and the OpenGL 4.3 standard. Given the physical capabilities of the card in question, such characteristics are quite useless, because, despite the fact that it is able to work with these software products, it does not have enough power to realize them 100%.
Software
And a little more about the technologies with which the M230 can interact.
- Mantle. This technology allows applications developed using it to access the video card immediately, and not through an intermediary (processor).
- OpenCL 1.2.
- Vulkan technology will help reduce the load on the CPU even more and provide better support for 3-D applications than OpenGL.
- AMD Enduro will make it possible to reduce the power consumption of the laptop, but only under certain conditions.
- this video card is installed on a computer running Windows 7 and older,
- the laptop has a discrete AMD Radeon card,
- You also need an Intel or AMD A-series processor.
- AMD APP Acceleration Technology improves video playback and application performance.
Testing
Finishing with the theoretical part, we move on to practice. What do the AMD Radeon R5 M230 reviews say? Almost all laptops using this card are characterized by poor gaming performance, which cannot but alarm.
So, we will start with the Skyrim game, released in 2011. A huge open world, stunning landscapes and a third-person view. Together with the latest technologies, the developers turned out to be quite a resource-intensive application. And here we were waiting for the first disappointment - at medium settings it gave out only 25 FPS, and at high settings - 16. What can we say about ultra-quality? Bioshok Infinite showed the result no better - 23-19 FPS on the appropriate settings. To make it clearer, let’s explain: the stable operation of most games without freezes and glitches takes place at 50-60 FPS. And with some lags you can play at 40. However, the values given by this video card are too low, especially for the games of this genre.
And this is already quite old toys. After such testing, it is safe to say that this video card is absolutely not suitable for gaming purposes. The most modern games can only start at the lowest settings, but you can not count on their smooth performance.
Summary
The predecessor of the device we are describing was the AMD Radeon HD 8570M graphics card . According to the developers, it was they who replaced it with this new card of the R5 series. It is hard to say how successful they were. The predecessor was able to give decent performance in all relevant games and applications, while the R5 does it “with a scratch”.
Users who buy laptops with installed AMD Radeon R5 M230 leave reviews quite unambiguous. All buyers note a low heating and quiet operation. And also the fact that this video card does not cause any conflicts and failures in the system, which means stable and continuous operation. But its power is too small to support games.
This is what becomes the main reason for negative reviews regarding this card. All buyers without exception note that they slow down the game, even at medium and low settings. At the same time, neither reinstalling drivers, nor other characteristics of the laptop, which may differ in different models, help.
In general, we are dealing with a good office video card, adapted to run some demanding applications and old toys, as well as supporting widescreen video, which allows it to be used as a multimedia processor.