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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milli - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I'm looking at the TPU review and the RX580 is winning by a big margin in RE7, Battlefield 1, COD, Deus Ex, Doom, F1 2016, Tomb Raider DX12 & Sniper Elite 4. All games from the past 6 months (more or less).Anandtech needs to urgently renew the tested games because these new games give a different view of these cards. In these games, even the Fury X often beats the GTX1070.
Ryan Smith - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
The game selection gets updated roughly once a year. The current suite was rolled out for the launch of Pascal, and we'll be updating the benchmark suite for the launch of Vega a bit later this year.Phiro69 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
I appreciate your measured pace in updating your benchmarks. I frequently need to justify - even if to just myself - hardware upgrades and if you are constantly tweaking/changing your benchmark suite I can't do a fruit to fruit comparison between a product you reviewed a couple years ago vs a brand new review, let alone apple to apple comparison.So when you do refresh your benchmark suites, I know it's a huge time sink to include older hardware in the new suite, but it's very appreciated and it's the difference between the level of detail that Anandtech has vs the other sites with launch day benchmarks.
Azix - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
should include clockspeed of the 1060 cardsRyan Smith - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Stock. So 1733MHz boost.Leyawiin - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
The TechPowerUp review is a little more pointed where power consumption is concerned in that it removes the rest of the system to show the card only. Basically, the factory overclocked Sapphire RX 580 is using twice as power as the stock GTX 1060 FE in their basket of games for a 5% increase in performance (use a factory OC'd GTX 1060 and that gap is closed). That's kind of pitiful This is like the FX-9590 of the current midrange GPUs.Icehawk - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
AMD seems to have a serious problem, both Ryzen and Polaris are pretty much maxed out from the factory clock & volt-wise whereas both Intel and NV have plenty of headroom.Lolimaster - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I don't really feel the need to OC the 1700. In fact I disable turbo and undervolted for sub 45°C load temps :DYou get so much cpu resources that OC is just an inefficient way to throw energy
BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
Overclocking is usually a sub-optimal and inelegant solution to the need for more computer resources. Before the experience was curated and limited to price premium parts people could realize a benefit by wringing more from low budget components. Presently, with the bulk of overclockable components residing on the high end where there's already sufficient compute power available for tasks to perform adequately, overclocking is nothing but a corporate sales gimmick that appeals to people that want to needlessly tinker or to people who feel compelled to do so in order to be braggarts. For those attempting to overclock the few curated parts in lower price brackets, they're better served simply purchasing a marginally more expensive next higher tier component and running it within spec.As for underclocking and undervolting, I can see a possible advantage in greater longevity, higher reliability, and lower cost of operation. It just simply no longer makes sense to bother going through the fruitless trouble of reaching for more with little practical reward to reap from the effort and resources expended along the way.
Mugur - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Yes, the problem is Global Foundry and their 14nm process...