The AMD Radeon RX 580 & RX 570 Review: A Second Path to Polaris
by Ryan Smith on April 18, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- AMD
- Radeon
- Polaris
- Radeon RX 500
The Test
Before diving into our tests, I want to quickly touch upon the test setup. Since AMD isn’t making any reference RX 580 or RX 570 cards, they instead sent over the PoworColor and Sapphire cards listed on the previous page. However both of those are factory overclocked, so both needed to be underclocked to stand-in for the baseline RX 580 and RX 570 cards.
The trick with underclocking cards like this isn’t the clockspeeds, but rather the power consumption. Factory overclocked cards are frequently built and configured for higher TDPs to support their frequencies, which can throw off our results, especially if a baseline card would power throttle in the same situation. So it’s sometimes not enough to simply underclock a card to represent the baseline performance.
In the case of today’s cards, thankfully both of them ship with a second, lower power BIOS. PowerColor calls this Quiet OC on the Red Devil RX 580, and along with reducing the max GPU power by 20W, it reduces the GPU boost clock to 1355MHz, a 15MHz overclock. Sapphire does one better on their Nitro+, as the second BIOS reduces the GPU power by 25W and brings the card down to AMD’s reference clocks.
PowerColor RedDevil RX 580's "Quiet OC" BIOS
Unfortunately the power limit coded into the BIOS don’t perfectly correlate with TBP – the value is just for GPU power – so it’s difficult to precisely tell if these BIOSes match AMD’s 185W and 150W TBPs. However if these values are off, they should still be close to what a real baseline card would get, as they’re in the ballpark of what I’d expect for AMD’s TBPs to begin with. So our results here should be reasonably accurate here for both total power consumption and for accounting for any power throttling during testing.
For our review of the Radeon RX 580 & RX 570, we’re using AMD’s “Crimson Press” driver, version 17.10.1030. Going by the build number, this driver appears to be between the latest 17.3.1 and 17.4.1 Crimson public drivers.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-4960X @ 4.2GHz |
| Motherboard: | ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Professional |
| Power Supply: | Corsair AX1200i |
| Hard Disk: | Samsung SSD 840 EVO (750GB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill RipjawZ DDR3-1866 4 x 8GB (9-10-9-26) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | Asus PQ321 |
| Video Cards: | PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 580 Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 570 AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) AMD Radeon RX 470 AMD Radeon R9 380 AMD Radeon R7 370 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founder's Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 Founder's Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 950 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 381.65 AMD Radeon Software Crimson Press Beta 17.10.1030 |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro |
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sandman74 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I agree with Ryan on the benchmarks. I often look back at older reviews to find a card that compares with my current one and seeing a game like BF4 in there helps me compare easily across both spectrums of my old card (a 980) and the newer cards.If they just showed newer games I wouldn't have a reference point for my older card.
Plus I still play BF4 !
Thanks for a detailed review.
cjpp78 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
They should have gave us the GPU in the Xbox Scorpio as the rx580..Of course with higher clocksSajidrh - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I have a 450 watts 80+ PSU form Antec Is it enough for RX 580 8gb???Sajidrh - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
its 80+ BronzeKakti - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
You'd have to tell us a lot more about your system. The main power hogs besides a dGPU are going to be the CPU (and if it's OC'd) and how many disk drives/dvd readers/etc you have. Assuming a stock i5 and two SATA drives max, I think 450 would be ok. A 90+watt CPU and a half dozen hard drives would probably be cutting it close at peak usage with a 580Haawser - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ9ro5pwfXYPeople so need to watch this before buying a 1060. The RX 580 + Freesync = Holy crap !
Hrel - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Wow, Nvidia is just demolishing them. That card will need to be at least $50 cheaper than the GTX1060 just to make any sense at all, and that's for the 580. Which is a problem since it's priced directly against the 1060.CiccioB - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
"we'll give you better cards, our efficiency has improved 2.5x over GCN, we will lead the revolution to new performance for games, we will end the increasing cost run, we will bla bla bla""Ermmm, in reality we cannot do anything of the above. As we already delivered a sub standard GPU than expected, we just decided to make more fools of ourselves and take that underwhelming power hungry sh*t called Polaris 10 that we can't sell even when given away for free and we are going to make you believe we have done a new revision with better characteristics by overclocking it a little making its inefficiency even better.
We could do exactly the same in July 2016, but we like when we ordinarily fool you and you happily cry for happiness in seeing those colored bars going a bit longer. Never mind the 240W needed to make the same work as a 1060... Remember... Look at my hypnotic eyes... We are going to deliver a more efficient product 2.5x better than GCN that will close the gap with the concurrent's now legendary performance/watt ratio."
If GCN was highly inefficient with respect to Maxwell, this sh*t is not even comparable to Pascal. AMD could not do worse than this.
The suspect is that this way Vega will look better than expected with respect to this... well... sh*t. There's no other way to call this faked improvements.
Pork@III - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Yes but with a little fix: "2.5x >oven< GCN" :DI think I'll take this card to bake steaks on her. I will just remove the fans.
Outlander_04 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
AMD improves its lead in DX 12 .No surprises