AMD and Nvidia are slugging it out in the midrange market again, thanks to AMD’s new RX 580 — but this latest iteration of Polaris has trouble taking the fight to Nvidia within a comparable power envelope.
Today, AMD is prepping a new GPU lineup based on a refresh of its Polaris (aka GCN 1.4, aka 4th-generation GCN) architecture. We’ll cover the other announcements, like the RX 550, RX 560, and RX 570 in a separate post. In this review, we’re diving into the RX 580 and how it performs relative to 2016’s RX 480 and the GTX 1060.
The RX 580 will be familiar to anyone who followed AMD’s GCN 1.4 architecture, aka Polaris. It’s built on the same core as the RX 480, with exactly the same features: 2304 GPU cores, 144 texture mapping units (TMUs), and 32 render outputs (ROPs). It’s a well-fed GPU, with 256GBps of memory bandwidth, and a full 8GB of RAM (a 4GB option will also be available).
AMD says the only adjustment they made to the base design were some silicon changes to enable higher clock speeds. On paper, the RX 580 is a modest improvement over the RX 480, with a base clock of 1257MHz and a boost clock of 1340MHz, compared with 1120MHz and 1266MHz for the old RX 480. That’s an increase of 1.12x on base clock and 1.08x on boost clock, for those of you playing along at home. With the RX 580, however, AMD has introduced GPU core clocks that float above their official specifications. This is nothing new — Nvidia does something similar with its Pascal GPUs — but it’s the first time we’ve seen Team Red take this tack. Our Gigabyte RX 580 runs at a rock-solid 1425MHz, which gives it a 1.13x advantage over the RX 480. That’s enough to conceivably matter, so let’s take a look at what we’ve got.
Gigabyte’s RX 580 Aorus OC is best described with terms like “beefy.”
If you recall the original reference designs for RX 480, AMD ran into some trouble with regard to power delivery over the 12V rail. There will be no such problems here — AMD’s original RX 480 shipped with a single 6-pin PCIe power connector, while the RX 580 Aorus OC has an eight-pin and a 6-pin connector. No, the GPU doesn’t consume anything like that much power; that’s just how overprovisioned this GPU is. The twin coolers keep the GPU quiet, even under heavy load and the Aorus holds a steady 1425MHz without a single fluctuation in any title we tested.
We’ve reviewed two Gigabyte Nvidia GPUs in the past year, but this is the first time in several years I’ve reviewed one of Gigabyte’s AMD cards, and I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. The coolers are quiet, clock speeds hold steady, and we had no issues whatsoever with the GPU.
All our GPU benchmarks were run using a Gigabyte X99-Ultra Gaming motherboard, 16GB of Corsair DDR4-2400 RAM, a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and Nvidia’s 381.65 Game Ready driver. All AMD GPUs were benchmarked on the release driver for the RX 580. While we’ve included a GTX 1070 for reference purposes, we won’t be saying much about its overall performance. At $379, it’s too expensive to be a direct competitor against GPUs meant to compete in the $200 to $270 price bracket.
