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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neblogai - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
For me, and many other people 2080 or 2080Ti might as well not exist. I'd never buy any GPU priced like that. In fact, I'd never even buy a €300+ card. Also- power use is not an issue- at 200W+, it is easy to cool, not noisy, and savings in electricity cost from having a GTX1060 would be only €5-10 per year (at 20 hour gaming per week, which I do not achieve). And in a sub-€300 market- nVidia has not offered anything for 2.5 years. So it is certainly better deal to buy a faster RX590 and get a €180 AAA game bundle for free, compared to similarly priced, slower GTX1060. There are other reasons as well, like Freesync, and futureproofing like 8GB of VRAM and better driver support (because nVidia will be moving toward doing optimizations for 20xx series).eva02langley - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
It is a polaris card. Everybody knew what to expect. I am not sure what you are talking about.Navi is due next year and the contender will be the 2070 RTX. I am going to speculate a tag price of 300$ which is a whole 200-300$ less than a RTX.
mapesdhs - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Xex360, AMD is not trying to compete because just don't buy them, so what's the point? There market and brand awareness simply isn't there to support a high end product stack atm, not until gamers stop being so irrational and actually buy AMD when they are objectively the more sensible option, whether based on price, performance or some combination of metrics.Cooe - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
"but now built on GlobalFoundries' 12nm process"Sorry, Nate, but ya got that one wrong. Polaris 30 is being fabbed at TSMC, just like the rest of AMD's GPUs.
eva02langley - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
... sure....porcupineLTD - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Where are people getting this from?Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Note that we currently have no information cooroborating the use of TSMC. And indeed it seems incredibly unlikely given AMD's WSA, and the fact that Polaris 30 has the exact same die size as Polaris 10. TSMC and GF's 12nm processes are not identical, porting a chip to TSMC would given you different geometry dimensions.lmcd - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Just like the rest of AMD's...https://www.anandtech.com/show/10446/the-amd-radeo...
GPUs. Right.
maroon1 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
What a jokeOnly 12% faster but also cost and consume more power than RX580 (and 108watt more than GTX 1060 at load)
It adds noting new. It just fills the big gap between RX580 and vega56
dr.denton - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
"It adds noting new. It just fills the big gap between RX580 and vega56"Literally all it was ever intended to do. Polaris is a 2 year old mid range GPU design, how do you expect anything revolutionary from that?