AMD Radeon RX 580 Graphics Card – Review

The Radeon RX 580 is one of the best mid-range graphics options currently available from AMD outside of the Vega architecture and although I am fairly late to the party here, I still wanted to see how well it does in 2018. The RX 580 is not a huge update over the last gen’s RX 480, it just offers a refined version of the Polaris 10 and 11 architectures which help with a slight increase in clock speeds. So without any further delay let’s take a look at the features of the AMD Radeon RX 580.

• Design:

First, let’s talk about the design of this graphics card. Starting up with front, there is this rubber texture which covers the whole thing and an air intake fan towards the end, it is a blower style cooler so the air is all pushed out through the rear. On the back the whole board is exposed with no back plate and the fan at the end sort of hangs out over the edge of the card, making it presumably for more cooling space.

Taking a look at the rear we can see that it takes up two PCI Express slots. The input output options include; one HDMI port and three Display Port 1.4 outputs. There are also some exhaust vents present for the outgoing air.

• AMD Radeon RX 580 Architecture:

The graphics card features what AMD calls “Polaris Enhanced” architecture which is basically refinements to the 14nm FinFET process designed to provide with clock speed bumps on the 500-series GPUs. The core configuration is also the same featuring 2,304 stream processors spread out alongside the 36 compute units (CUs) and the same 144 texture units and 32 render output units (ROPs).

only new feature added to the Polaris GPU is the intermediate memory clock speed, the previous generation only  supported two states, ‘low/idle’ and ‘max performance.’ This intermediate state can help in reducing the power consumption.

Also, the company has improved their power saving feature known as the Radeon Chill which basically caps framerates in order to improve the overall power usage which in some cases can result in stuttering. This can serve as a great feature for notebooks but unfortunately, it does not work with the DX12 or Vulkan because it is a driver-side tuning feature and the low-level APIs bypass such things.

• Specifications:

Now let’s talk about the specs of Radeon RX 580, the memory being used in this graphics card is the same 8 Gigabytes of GDDR5 offering a full 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. The reference version of the card delivers 1,340 MHz of boost clock speed which is a decent upgrade compared to the RX 480 which has the boost clock speed of 1310 MHz on the expensive models.

Of course, the enhanced clock speeds come with a higher thermal power design (TDP). AMD recommends a 500w power supply with a six-pin connector for this GPU.

• Performance And Benchmarks:

The performance is pretty much what you can expect, it is capable of running all the recent AAA titles maxed out at 1080p and 60 FPS. It is also capable of 1440p in most games, however in some visually demanding you might need to turn down few graphics settings. You can even try out 4K in lightweight titles like CS GO, Rocket League and Dota 2.

Same is the story in benchmarks, the scores are pretty impressive and it just ranks a bit behind the GTX 1060 which is a pretty masterclass GPU in the mid-range category.

• Final Verdict:

The AMD Radeon RX 580 is a really great graphics but if you already own the Radeon RX 480 then there is no point of upgrading as the performance bump is really minimum. Also, it can not beat the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 which performs much better at a lower price. This graphics card is for AMD fanboys who didn’t fancy the RX 480 in 2016 and now have the budget and the will to upgrade their gaming rig. You can get your hands on it from Amazon here.