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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Lord-Bryan - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
That was cold!Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Vega is launching with Vega branding (replacing the Fury branding). AMD obviously knows that the people in the market for such cards are all over review sites, so know the product as Vega already. Why change a good name?Mugur - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Yes, they officially named the product RX Vega at the end of the Capsaicin&Cream event.lordken - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
@hoohoo: exactly, that's what I was thinking right from beginning when they announced this nonsense. This was totally lame move and just irritates ppl like me.I would just have hopped that Ryan nails AMD a little bit more for this stupid move and not using 4x5 names which they had present in RX400 slides as possible revisions names.
@DanNeely: no OEM doesn't need new numbers, that's bullshit story. Or if they does how 485 isn't new number to 480?
OEM wants to sell stuff, and if AMD cant produce good enough product they need to resort to misleading customers and playing stupid "new gen/new number" game.
What I mean by misleading customers? Apart having us for idiots, well I can imagine that some 480 (higher end) will have better perf than some 580 (lower end). Average joe is not gonna compare that his 580 has 20mhz lower clock then 480 OC/whatever edition. Because in honest word it couldn't happen that next gen same tier card have lower perf than previous gen under any circumstances...
tehidiot - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Meet the cards page isn't up :)What are the clocks of the red devil card?
HOOfan 1 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Well...they did refresh the R9 200 series with the R9 300 series, just before Fury launched....maybe this means Vega will be out soon...Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Vega is coming before 1 June. Good spot -- it's exactly like the 300 series and Fury, isn't it!FireSnake - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Nice review. Keep up the good work!And nice refresh also :)
jcwagers - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Ryan, the clockspeed chart is showing 1680 mhz for Ashes while all the rest are showing around 1380 mhz. Is that a typo? Just letting you know so you can fix it. Thanks for the article. :)jcwagers - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Oops....it was for the 580 card.