Gadgetory

what's up Gaz today AMD launches its first GPU based on the new Polaris architecture aimed at mainstream gamers throughout the PC Kingdom the R X 480 promises smooth gaming and fluid VR experiences for significantly less coin than the current market offerings MSRP of the reference 8 gig model comes in at 239 while the 4 gig reference card sits at just 199 us that's equivalent to just 180 euros or as of last week 500,000 British pounds while AMD in recent years has sometimes been regarded as the economical choice in lieu of performance compared to its competitors over the last few weeks a number of leaked benchmarks and invidious price drop on all their 900 series GPUs clued us in the team read could be bringing more to the table than just attractive MSRP s with its new card sporting the new 14 nanometer FinFET process and 4th gen GC and architecture the R X 480 features the latest support for DirectX 12 and Vulcan AMD freesync HDR and the ability to stream and record gameplay up to 4k with h.265 at 60fps on the chip we get 36 compute units 2300 and 4 stream processors a bass and boost clock of eleven hundred and twenty and twelve hundred and sixty six megahertz respectively and either four or eight gigs of gddr5 on a 256 bit bus the die shrink comes with improved power efficiency over the last generation as well but the TDP of 150 watts taking a closer look at AMD's new reference cooler we see it features an enclosed plastic shroud with a single 75 millimeter blower style fan that ejects air out the back it also has a single 6 pin power connector facing the front side of the card on the top we find that the cooler actually extends beyond the relatively short PCB making the total card length nine and a half inches or 241 millimetres you won't find a sexy backplate here unfortunately but the cooler does look very nice with its textured surface and straightforward design on the back you'll find no signs of DVI just three DisplayPort 1.4 and a single HDMI on the software side of things AMD also introduces their new tweaking utility called wot man which makes me think all overclocking tools should be given fun superhero names this program effectively replaces AMD overdrive in the global Radeon settings and his skin with a sleek modern UI with a nice assortment of adjustable parameters when overclocking the rx 480 in wot man I maxed out the power limit to 50% and managed to increase the core clock speed by just 4.5% before reaching instability taking the maximum boost clock to 13 hundred and 25 megahertz the RX for 80 may not be the overclocking champ we always hope a new video card will be but there's a fair chance we'll be able to squeeze more juice out with aftermarket cards sporting more than just a reference 6 pin power plug memory clock speed was more forgiving going as far as the slider could take it to 20 250 megahertz all of this was done without touching the voltage and as of now voltage values in watt man can only be assigned for each DPM state manually though AMD is looking into adding a voltage offset slider later on for fan control you can assign a minimum rpm so your fan never spins below the assigned value and target which is the fastest the fan will run at if the card is not above its temp target you can also set a minimum acoustic limit in megahertz that dictates the threshold at which acoustics can be violated user options for temperature control include a max value where the GPU will throttle down the clock speed if it hits that assigned temperature and target indicates how hot the GPU can get before ramping up the fan for all my overclocked testing I set my max to 83 degrees Celsius and my target to 80 with these parameters I did encounter some thermal throttling on the overclocked our X 480 with the max GPU temp itting a toasty 85 degrees Celsius and the core clock speed averaging twelve hundred and ninety two megahertz compared to our max clock speed of again thirteen hundred and twenty five it's not an alarming loss but it is significant enough to mention so I'm looking forward to seeing this effect minimized with the arrival of custom coolers fortunately the reference card does a nice job in the acoustics department it stays comfortably quiet at low to mid rpms and even at the 60 percent fan speed I tested at the fan outputs a fairly calm humming noise that's pretty non intrusive and quite impressive for a reference design before we take to the benchmarks here's a look at the total system power draw featuring the cards I tested at reference speeds the RX 486 just about as much power as the EVGA super super clocked GTX 970 and when overclocked consumes more than all of our Nvidia cards but is still well below the Nitro r9 390 which as we're about to see yields an impressive performance per watt with the exception of the RX 480 all the cards in today's tests are factory overclocked models and have not been manually tweaked by me in any way however if you've been following the news lately you may have heard that msi gtx 1070 was being shipped to reviewers with a pre tweaked firmware that set the cards to an aggressive OC profile so I've gone ahead and switched that to the gaming profile which more accurately reflects the clock speeds retail consumers can expect out of the box only our RX 480 will be showing both reference and manually over clock speeds today our testbed features a gigabyte gaming g1 Wi-Fi with a 5820k overclocked 240 400 megahertz and 16 gigs of DDR for all games tested were run in Windows 10 at 1920 by 1080 and 2560 by 1440 using the latest drivers from Nvidia and the pre-release press drivers straight from AMD without further ado here are the benchmarks all right so those are the results while most of them since the GPU does feature async shaders I did run a quick test for DirectX 12 performance in ashes of the singularity and found a 20 percent increase over DirectX 11 in average frame rates at 1080 and rather marginal games at higher resolutions overall it looks like there's still a bit of room for improvement on the async compute front throughout our testing the cards max VRAM usage fit around 5 gigs which certainly advocates having more than a four gig frame buffer these days even at sub 4k resolutions now to make sense of today's numbers I've calculated the overall gaming performance of each card by averaging the average frame rates across all games not confusing at all the end result shows that our overclocked rx 488 gig model fared just 0.6 percent slower than the super super clocked GTX 970 3.8 percent slower than the Nitro r9 390 and a whopping 59% faster than the msi gtx 960 and hitman we saw the RX 4 80 best the gtx 970 and r9 390 at both resolutions and in crysis 3 it beats out the GTX 970 at 1920 by 1080 this is kind of exciting when you consider that the RX 480 is using its first pre-release driver versus the highly mature drivers of its competitors while it would have been awesome to see VR X 480 beat out the GTX 970 more consistently here where the Polaris chip takes a slight loss in raw performance it makes up in terms of value with the RX 488 gig priced at 239 bucks it nearly delivers 2 frames per dollar edging out the 1.5 FPD of the super super clock GTX 970 and scoring well above the other cards even if we're to use in videos new price drop with the toss and rebate of $259 the GTX 970 would still only yield 1.8 frames per dollar and that's presumably for a non factory overclocked model that would score lower than our super super clock Edition today so if we're following the numbers here the RX 480 at least the 8 gig model I've tested packs in quite an amazing value for performance that trails closely behind and occasionally outperforms the notably more expensive gtx 970 and r9 390 it's not the greatest overclocker and it does suffer from some moderate throttling but hopefully the custom board partners can deliver the cooling and power delivery needed to turn things around if you simply can't wait for the aftermarket models AMD's new reference cooler appears on the warm side without the proper tuning but offers an acoustic profile less atrocious than what we've seen in the past but that is gonna do it for now guys so let me know what you all think of this new card in the comments and don't forget to toss me a like on this video if you enjoyed it before you go feel free to pick up an awesomesauce shirt in my store they're sure to turn some heads especially if you're not wearing pants as always I'm Cowell with awesome saws Network thank you all for watching subscribe to the channel for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and I will see you all in the next video