The AMD Radeon RX 590 Review, feat. XFX & PowerColor: Polaris Returns (Again)
by Nate Oh on November 15, 2018 9:00 AM ESTThe Test
Like with the Radeon RX 580, we emulated AMD's RX 590 reference specs by using the PowerColor RX 590 Red Devil's Quiet BIOS, which drops the boost clock to 1545MHz. As factory overclocked cards are frequently built and configured for higher TDPs to support their frequency curves, where simple underclocking doesn't necessarily reflect what might be throttled performance in a baseline card. The power limit coded into the BIOS don’t perfectly correlate with TBP, so it’s difficult to precisely determine if they match AMD’s 225W TBPs, but it should be reasonably accurate for a virtual reference card.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-7820X @ 4.3GHz |
| Motherboard: | Gigabyte X299 AORUS Gaming 7 (F9g) |
| Power Supply: | EVGA 1000 G3 |
| Hard Disk: | OCZ Toshiba RD400 (1TB) |
| Memory: | G.Skill TridentZ DDR4-3200 4 x 8GB (16-18-18-38) |
| Case: | NZXT Phantom 630 Windowed Edition |
| Monitor: | LG 27UD68P-B |
| Video Cards: | XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy PowerColor Radeon RX 590 Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 590 AMD Radeon RX 580 AMD Radeon RX 480 AMD Radeon R9 390 AMD Radeon R9 380 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB Founders Edition NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 |
| Video Drivers: | NVIDIA Release 416.81 AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.40 Press (Nov6 Build) |
| OS: | Windows 10 Pro (1803) |
| Spectre/Meltdown Mitigations | Yes (both) |
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Samus - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I donno, you can pickup a used 1070 for under $300 practically anywhere (facebook mp, forums, even ebay) as people upgrade to RTX...which I honestly can't believe people are doing, but hey, they're doing it.Spunjji - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
It's really quite astonishing, but great for those of us who can think our way our of a paper bag :DManch - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Can't go across the border and bring one back?Targon - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
$400-$450 USD for a Vega 64.Falck - Sunday, June 6, 2021 - link
This comment aged well XDOpencg - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Just get something cheap for now and wait for navi in 1 year. Gpu buyers the 10 series window is gone. This next year is going to suck untill navi comes out.Allan_Hundeboll - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
GTX1070/Vega 56 is expensive toys. I only play like 2 hours a week, and only need min. FPS to stay above 60. 1440P Ultra settings sure looks pretty, but doesn't really improve my gaming experience considerably compared to 1080P High settings.So I recently replaced my defective R9 280 with a 4GB RX580. Only paid 140$ and sold the game bundle for 20$. My RX580 clocks to 1480/9600Mhz so I'm perfectly satisfied with the performance I got for 120$.
casperes1996 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
How is it an investment? Unless you play Counter Strike professionally, I doubt you get a return on that "investment". how much the "minimum" is depends how much money you have to spare for playing games.PeachNCream - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Investment in this case was probably used in a casual sense rather than to imply there was a more conventional set of investing considerations given to the purchase. It is common knowledge, after all, that computer hardware generally loses value rapidly and computer gaming typically only yields an intangible reward in the form of entertainment.wumpus - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
If I wanted an "investment" in the sense of "depriciating slightly slower than fish" I'd wait for something made in 7nm (not the Vega, unless you fit their market exactly). And I suspect nvidia should have something up their sleeve to spoil Navi's party (but at least wait to see if they survive, this latch batch of nvida cards seems to just fail).GPU architecture may improve, but it will take a long time to get a smaller process than TSMC's new 7nm. This is about as close to "future proofing" as you are going to get.