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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BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Eh, the use of TBP did leap out as an error right away until I spent a few minutes thinking about it. I get that the industry (well the industry of all two of the world's GPU companies) is constantly trying to buzzword its way into presenting a product in the best light possible, but it seems like a stupid and pointless terminology change from over here.Wineohe - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I drank the koolaid and bought a pair of RX480's when they first came out. Bad idea. I followed this up with a GTX 1080, which is what I should have bought in the first place. If my budget was a single RX480/580 then I would definitely opt for a 1060 instead.Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
RX570 4GB is damn good deal for 1080p or 1600x1200 CRT-Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Then sell it in 2019 for a nice RX770 10nm gpu.Pork@III - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Excessive consumption of electricity for devices from the middle class as performance. AMD again began to offer plates, which can fry eggs.SydneyBlue120d - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Is VP9 with HDR decoding enabled with these cards?slickr - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Good job? Anandtech has become the laughing stock of hardware reviews. The suite they are using is painfully outdated, with games 3-4 years old on average, the number of games is so small, the titles are outdated, they tested Battlefield 4, instead of Battlefield 1. BF1 supports DX12 as well, its the new engine that most EA games use and are going to use in the future and they are testing BF4 which is a very old title with an old engine that no one is using anymore!Dirt Rally, Crysis 3, all old games. Even Hitman is an old game now and should be dropped. Where is For Honor, Mass Effect Andromeda, Ghost Recon Wildlands, Deus EX: MD, Watch Dogs 2, Mafia 3, Forza 3, Sniper Elite 4, BF1, etc...
The only relevant games they use are ROTR, AOTS, The Division and Witcher 3. No minimums tested, no maximums, no frametime, no overclocking, no custom clocked cards on the Nvidia side, etc...
This is a barebones review!
milkod2001 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Im afraid you are right. Anand is no longer in charge of this site, it is owned by Purch, advertising company which only care about ad clicks. They could not give a slightest sh.t. about your latest games benchmarks.Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
True, the site is owned by Purch. But it is run by me, and when it comes to Editorial, the buck stops here.Every article you see posted here and every choice made in how we benchmark is my responsibility. Even on those articles I don't write, the editor in charge has spoken to me at some point to gather my feedback and to solicit my advice. This is to ensure that the articles you guys get live up to the quality that AnandTech is known for. And I do that precisely because I do care; I care about bringing you guys the information and analysis you need to see, and I care about trying to bring you the things you'd like to see.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I commented on the game selection elsewhere in the thread: http://www.anandtech.com/comments/11278/amd-radeon...In short we refresh once per year, and the next refresh will be Vega (the current suite was rolled out with the Pascal launch). This ensures consistency between articles, and makes Bench more useful for you guys. There are other sites out there that do differently - and it's totally a valid way to test - but it's not how we want to do things. Our goal is apples-to-apples, and sometimes that requires being methodical and a bit slow. The benefit is that we can stand behind our data knowing full well that the results make sense, and that we have a very good understanding of the tests used.
As for the number of games, there are 9 games here. On the one hand this is more than more sites, so I'd like to think we're doing well enough here, and on the other hand there is a practical limit to how many games we can have, due to how long it takes to run all of those games. If we added more games, we'd have to give up something else. And I should note that every data point you see here was collected or validated for this article, so you're looking at 9 games, 13 video cards, and multiple resolutions per card. It adds up very quickly.
As for custom clocked cards, this has a bit of a history to it:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3988/the-use-of-evga...
The last time we included the opposition's factory overclocked cards, you guys rightfully called us out on it, and made it clear that you wanted apples-to-apples testing. Since then, this is exactly what we've delivered: reviews and their conclusions are based around stock-clocked cards/configurations. This ensures that what you see is the baseline performance of a card, and that no retail card should be slower than the card we've tested. Especially when most buyers purchase the cheapest card they can find, it's not the fastest card that matters, it's the slowest.