AMD Radeon R5 220 OEM

Power and Cooling — TDP, PSU recommendation, connector requirements

The AMD Radeon R5 220 OEM operates at a modest 19 W TDP, placing it firmly in the ultra-low-power segment of the graphics card market. This figure is notably low, which has direct implications for system integration — the card requires no auxiliary power connectors, drawing all its operational power solely from the PCIe slot. The absence of power connectors simplifies installation in pre-built systems and small form factor chassis where cable management is at a premium.

For power supply requirements, the suggested PSU rating is 200 W. This relatively low recommendation means the card can be paired with the kind of basic, entry-level power supplies commonly found in office desktops and budget home systems. A 200 W unit is sufficient headroom for the card itself, though the total system draw will depend on other components such as the CPU and storage drives.

The physical design is a single-slot form factor with a length of 168 mm (6.6 inches). This compact footprint allows the card to fit into most standard cases, including slim and low-profile configurations where space is constrained. The single-slot cooler, while simple, is adequate for a 19 W component — the thermal load is minimal enough that even a basic aluminum heatsink with a small fan can manage temperatures effectively without generating excessive noise.

From a connectivity standpoint, the card offers a DVI port, an HDMI 1.3a output, and a VGA connector. The inclusion of VGA is particularly relevant for legacy monitors and older projectors, making this card a practical drop-in upgrade for aging office systems that still rely on analog displays. The HDMI 1.3a version supports standard HD resolutions and audio passthrough, though it lacks the higher bandwidth of newer HDMI revisions.

The interface is PCIe 2.0 x16, which is backward compatible with modern PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 slots, ensuring the card can be installed in a wide range of motherboards without issue. The production status is marked as end-of-life, and the release date was December 20, 2013. This places the card in the Volcanic Islands generation, built on the TeraScale 2 architecture with a 40 nm process node from TSMC.

Who Should Consider It

The R5 220 OEM is not a gaming card by any stretch of the modern definition. Benchmark results indicate it belongs in the 50th percentile of all GPUs, which in practical terms means it sits at the very bottom of the performance spectrum — this percentile ranking reflects a card that is essentially at the midpoint of the entire GPU population, but given the vast number of integrated and low-end parts, this position still represents very limited 3D capability.

For gaming workloads, the data shows this card is suitable only for extremely lightweight esports titles or older games at low settings and reduced resolutions. The FP32 compute throughput of 104.0 GFLOPS, combined with a pixel rate of 2.600 GPixel/s and a texture rate of 5.200 GTexel/s, suggests that even 720p gaming will be challenging for anything beyond the most basic 2D or simple 3D scenes. Users attempting modern 3D games will likely experience frame rates that are too low for comfortable play, even at the lowest graphical presets.

The card is better suited for office productivity, web browsing, video playback, and driving multiple displays for non-graphical workloads. The 1024 MB of DDR3 memory on a 64-bit bus with 8.528 GB/s of bandwidth is sufficient for 2D desktop compositing and basic video acceleration, but it will struggle with high-resolution textures or large frame buffers.

For resolution-specific guidance: at 1080p, the card can handle desktop environments and video playback, but gaming is not recommended. At 720p or lower, very old or highly optimized games might run at playable frame rates, but users should expect significant compromises in visual quality. The card is not viable for 1440p or 4K workloads of any kind, as the memory bandwidth and compute resources are far too limited.

How It Compares

The FACT PACK provides no nearest rivals for this card, which is telling in itself. This absence of comparative data in the benchmark database suggests that the R5 220 OEM occupies a niche so low in the performance hierarchy that few other discrete GPUs are directly comparable in terms of raw scores. The average benchmark score is recorded as 0, which further indicates that the card either has not been subjected to the standard benchmark suite or has produced results that fall below the measurable threshold of the database's testing methodology.

Without rival data, positional analysis must rely on the percentile field. The 50th percentile placement is interesting — it suggests that when ranked against the entire population of GPUs in the database, the R5 220 OEM lands exactly in the middle. However, this is likely skewed by the inclusion of many integrated graphics solutions and extremely old hardware in the dataset. In practical terms, the card performs at a level that is competitive with integrated graphics from its era, but far below any modern discrete GPU.

The predecessor and successor fields provide some generational context: this card follows the Sea Islands generation and precedes Pirate Islands. This places it in a transitional period where AMD was iterating on its low-end offerings, but the TeraScale 2 architecture was already aging by the time of its 2013 release, having been superseded by newer designs in AMD's portfolio.

FAQ

Q: Does this card require a dedicated power cable from the power supply?

A: No. The card has no power connectors and draws all its power from the PCIe slot, with a total TDP of 19 W.

Q: What is the maximum memory bandwidth available to this GPU?

A: The card has a 64-bit memory bus with DDR3 memory running at 533 MHz (1066 Mbps effective), yielding a total bandwidth of 8.528 GB/s.

Q: Can this card support modern gaming at 1080p resolution?

A: The benchmark data does not indicate playable performance for modern titles. The 104.0 GFLOPS FP32 compute and 2.600 GPixel/s pixel rate are only suitable for basic 2D workloads and very lightweight or older games.

Q: What display outputs are available on this card?

A: The card provides one DVI port, one HDMI 1.3a port, and one VGA connector, allowing connection to a mix of digital and analog displays.

Q: What DirectX version does this card support?

A: The card supports DirectX 11.2 (feature level 11_0) and OpenGL 4.4. It does not support Vulkan, as no Vulkan version is listed in the specifications.

Q: Is this card still in production?

A: No. The production status is end-of-life, and the card was released on December 20, 2013, making it a legacy product.

Benchmark Performance

The benchmark data for the AMD Radeon R5 220 OEM is sparse, with an average benchmark score of 0 and no recorded individual benchmark entries. This absence of measurable results is itself a critical data point — it suggests that the card either fails to complete standard benchmark runs or produces scores so low that they round to zero in the database's scoring system.

The 50th percentile ranking against all GPUs requires careful interpretation. This does not mean the card performs at a mid-range level in absolute terms. Rather, it indicates that in the database's population of GPUs — which includes a substantial number of integrated graphics processors, legacy cards, and low-end discrete solutions — the R5 220 OEM sits at the median. This position is consistent with a card that is roughly equivalent to contemporary integrated graphics in terms of raw compute capability.

The computational metrics tell a coherent story. The FP32 performance of 104.0 GFLOPS is the headline number, and it places the card in a performance class that is roughly an order of magnitude below even entry-level gaming GPUs from the same era. The pixel fill rate of 2.600 GPixel/s and texture fill rate of 5.200 GTexel/s are similarly constrained, reflecting the limited number of execution units: 80 shading units, 8 texture mapping units, and 4 raster operation units.

These figures indicate that the card's architecture — TeraScale 2 on a 40 nm process with 292 million transistors on a 59 mm² die — was designed for basic 3D acceleration rather than serious gaming. The transistor density of 4.9 million per square millimeter is modest by modern standards, but was typical for the 40 nm era. The card's memory subsystem, with 1024 MB of DDR3 on a 64-bit bus, creates a significant bottleneck: the 8.528 GB/s of bandwidth limits the card's ability to feed its shader units with texture data, further constraining real-world performance.

In the absence of direct rival benchmarks, the performance assessment must be qualitative. The card is not competitive with any modern discrete GPU, and even among its contemporaries, it would rank at the bottom of the discrete GPU tier. The absence of nearest rivals in the database reinforces this view — there are simply no other GPUs with comparable benchmark scores to place alongside it.

Memory Subsystem

The R5 220 OEM is equipped with 1024 MB of DDR3 memory, which is the minimum viable amount for a discrete GPU in the modern era. The memory type is DDR3 rather than GDDR5, which is a significant differentiator — GDDR5 offers substantially higher bandwidth per pin, but the 64-bit bus width here further compounds the limitation.

The memory clock runs at 533 MHz, which translates to 1066 Mbps effective due to DDR (double data rate) operation. With a 64-bit bus, the total memory bandwidth works out to 8.528 GB/s. To put this in perspective, this bandwidth figure is lower than what many modern CPUs achieve with dual-channel DDR4 system memory, and it is a fraction of what even entry-level gaming GPUs deliver.

For high-resolution workloads, this memory subsystem is the primary limiting factor. At 1080p, a typical frame buffer requires 8-16 MB of memory for color and depth data, which the card can accommodate. However, texture streaming and shader data access at this resolution will quickly saturate the 8.528 GB/s bandwidth. The result is that even if the GPU's compute units could process more data, the memory system cannot deliver it fast enough, leading to frame rate stalls and texture pop-in.

The 64-bit bus width is particularly restrictive. A 128-bit bus would double the available bandwidth at the same memory clock, but the card's low-end positioning dictated the narrower interface. The 1024 MB capacity is also limiting for modern workloads — while it is sufficient for basic desktop use and older games, any application that requires more than 1 GB of video memory will either fail to run or be forced to use system memory over the PCIe bus, which is dramatically slower.

For 4K resolution, the memory subsystem is entirely inadequate. A 4K frame buffer alone can consume 32-64 MB, and the texture data required for modern games at that resolution would exceed both the capacity and bandwidth available. The card's 2.600 GPixel/s pixel rate further confirms that 4K output is not feasible for any accelerated workload, though the card could technically drive a 4K desktop at low bit depths through its HDMI 1.3a output, which supports 4K at reduced refresh rates.

The 8.528 GB/s bandwidth also affects compute workloads. General-purpose GPU computing tasks that rely on memory bandwidth, such as image processing or physics simulations, will see poor performance regardless of the compute unit utilization. The memory subsystem is balanced for the card's intended use case — basic 3D acceleration and video playback — where bandwidth demands are modest and the 1024 MB capacity is sufficient for frame buffers and small texture caches.