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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JasonMZW20 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Tile-based rendering does wonders for power consumption. AMD is still doing full scene rendering, which is expensive and inefficient.Vega will join the TBR party. We'll see if power consumption has dropped significantly then.
But, isn't that the general rule when you OC? Throw power saving out the window. I have my old R9 280 at 1200MHz. Draws about 230W. Don't really care.
Tewt - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
I was hoping to read something about Freesync 2 and moreso now after reading the review to find the performance gains weren't as exciting and not without caveats. Since there currently are no Freesync 2 monitors though, there is no point in reviewing this feature. It would have been a nice value added feature to help offset the minimal gains in performance. Too bad AMD couldn't capitalize on this feature to make this release more exciting.Cygni - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Keeping the memory specs down will help them move to undercutting the 1060 on price, which they will need to do pretty heartily to get some sales volume. Hopefully this is enough to encourage Nvidia into a price war, as they have been milking the 1060's pricepoint pretty heavily for a long time now. Other than a brief dip to the $210 range on black friday, prices have stayed pretty high on 6GB cards.brucek2 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Most of us learn as small children the peril of crying wolf. You'll get a lot of attention the first time you do it, but if there's no actual wolf you'll soon get a bad reputation and no further attention.AMD is crying wolf here. These are not new generation products. The new numbering is essentially a lie. I still very much want there to be a real competitor to Nvidia / Intel, but crud like this is not making it easy to root for them.
fanofanand - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
New to the tech world? This is pretty standard stuff after a new arch. Nvidia has done it several times as have AMD. Guess what, Intel and AMD do it with their CPUs too. Oh my, looks like it happens with mobile SOCs too.haukionkannel - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link
It is norm to have rebrands by both makers. Same is true to cpus even more...tipoo - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
They were pretty clear early on that it was just an overclock of the 480, and that's what it is. Not sure what people expected. Would 485 be a better name? Probably, but that's the GPU world for ya.AbbieHoffman - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
And yet the old R9 290X and R9 390X are still better cards.sonichedgehog36 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Typo: TBPs on page one.sonichedgehog36 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
Please delete the post above.