The Radeon RX 580 is one of the best graphics options currently available from AMD outside
of Vega, and although I’m fairly late to the party here I wanted to see how well it
does going into 2018, so let’s see how it performs in some gaming benchmarks.
Let’s take a quick look at the card itself starting with the front.
There’s this rubber texture covering the whole thing and an air intake fan towards
the end.
It’s a blower style cooler, so the air is all pushed out through the rear.
On the back the whole board is exposed with no backplate, and toward the end we can see
that the fan sort of hangs off over the edge of the card, making it longer for presumably
more cooling space.
On the rear of the card we can see that it takes up two PCIe slots, and features one
HDMI port and three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs.
There’s also some exhaust vents for the outgoing air.
As for the specs it’s got 2,304 stream processors, 8GB of GDDR5 memory, a base clock speed of
1,257MHz and a boost speed of 1,340MHz.
While overclocking I was only really able to get it stable at 1,350Mhz which wasn’t
much higher than what it was boosting too anyway, and I didn’t find it to make enough
practical difference to justify redoing all of the gaming benchmarks again as the results
were within margin of error ranges, and your results will vary anyway depending on the
silicon lottery.
It is a reference card though, there are other partner cards available with higher clocks
than this that should perform better.
AMD recommend a 500 watt power supply, and note that the card will typically draw around
185 watts.
The system that I’m testing in has an Intel 8700K overclocked to 5.1GHz.
I’m using the best CPU that I can for gaming in order to reduce it being a limiting factor
in the benchmarks.
The system also has 16GB of DDR4 memory running at 2,666MHz, and is running Windows 10 with
all updates to date applied, along with AMD’s 18.2.1 drivers.
With all that in mind let’s take a look at the benchmark results!
PUBG was tested using the replay feature, and we’re getting respectable results, not
quite able to average 60 FPS at max settings, but at high even the 1% lows are approaching
60, although this will of course vary based on what’s going on in game at the time.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was tested with the build in benchmark tool, and even at max settings
the frame here rate is quite good.
The Witcher 3 is again doing quite well, even at max settings, as I don’t think you need
a high frame rate to enjoy this game, and it felt smooth even at ultra settings.
Watchdogs 2 is a fairly resource intensive game, and another that I don’t think needs
a high frame rate, and I personally found it to run well at very high or lower.
Battlefield 1 was getting pretty nice frame rates even at ultra settings, with the 1%
lows well above 60 FPS, it ran nice and smooth the whole time for me.
Shadow of war was tested with the built in benchmark tool, and we’re getting decent
frame rates at max settings, but we can get much higher if we drop the settings down a
bit.
Ghost Recon was also tested with the built in benchmark tool, and while I wouldn’t
really want to play at ultra settings, very high or lower seems to run quite well.
Ashes of the Singularity was tested mainly because I was curious to see how much of a
difference Vulkan would make, as it turns out it didn’t do as good as I thought, still
a bit better than DirectX 11 though.
I’ve also run some benchmark tools from Unigine, 3DMark and VRMark, just pause the
video if you want to check out the results.
As shown the 580 is performing quite well, it’s capable of running modern games even
at high settings while getting fairly good frame rates at 1080p, and although I didn’t
do any proper testing at higher resolutions it should still be pretty decent for 1440p
at around medium settings, it seems fairly close to an Nvidia 1060.
We’ve just finished summer here in Australia and I’ve tested the temperatures with an
ambient room temperature of 24 degrees celsius both at stock speeds, and with my small overclock.
We can see that the overclock doesn’t really change the temperatures that much, and in
general while actually playing games like PUBG I don’t think that the card gets that
hot, while maxing it out with the Heaven benchmark tool it gets a bit warmer, but nothing too
serious, although this would likely be much better using a custom 580 with a better cooling
solution, rather than this reference blower style option.
Just for fun I’ve also had a look at the temperatures of the card using my thermal
camera, at idle the hottest area on the back gets up to around 43 degrees celsius, while
under full load the back seems to be a little hotter than the GPU core temperatures noted
earlier, getting up to around 92.
Unfortunately I didn’t measure the overall system volume at idle, but under full load
we can see that it gets very loud, up to around 68 decibels, and here’s how that sounds.
While testing I also didn’t notice any coil whine with my particular unit, although I
admit it would be a challenge to hear through that fan noise.
Pricing is where things get interesting, as you may have heard the prices of graphics
cards are fairly inflated due to cryptocurrency miners buying them up, as the AMD cards typically
perform better at this task compared to the Nvidia options.
Custom 580 cards currently seem to start at around $460 USD and go up from there, and
it’s difficult to say whether that’s worth it as I’ve got no idea if the prices will
go down any time soon or continue trending upwards.
In any case from my own testing, it seems to perform similar to an Nvidia 1060 card
that I’ve got which is about $130 USD less, so that might be a better option unless you
can get a good deal on a pre built system with a 580 included, as that can be a good
way to save money in the current climate.
So what did you guys think of the Radeon RX 580 graphics card?
Be sure to let me know your thoughts down in the comments, and leave a like if you found
the video useful.
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