Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today I'm checking out gigabytes most extreme Radeon rx 580 graphics card and as such it obviously falls under the Auris branding the RX 5/8 extr otherwise known as extreme and that's extreme with an ex not an e is basically gigabyte making amends for messing up with the RX 480 so some inexplicable reason gigabyte managed to produce one of the worst are X 480 series going around the g1 gaming model for example hit load temperatures of a degrees and it wasn't particularly quiet about it either meanwhile competing models were running around 10 degrees cooler while managing to generate less noise I couldn't really work out what was going on there I mean the cooler looked decent enough maybe the heat pipes were fake I don't know anyway all that doesn't matter anymore gigabyte have pulled their finger out and completely revamp things for the new rx 500 series recently I featured the Auris rx5 ATX tear in my GTX 1060 vs. rx 580 comparison obviously it was used to represent the red team and it did an excellent job managing to edge out the GTX 10 69 gigabits per second version by a small margin haven't been very impressed with the Auris brand card over the past 4 weeks or so I thought it was about time I gave it a proper review naturally my timing couldn't have been any worse as right now it's nearly impossible to purchase an RX 500 series graphics card let alone a premium rx 580 model the reason for this is of course GPU based cryptocurrency mining namely aetherium right now aetherium is blowing up and everyone wants a piece of the action and since AMD hardware is much more efficient when it comes to mining the radio and GPUs are currently a seriously hot item and I mean that in a good way so I get the timing of this review isn't great but surely before too long you will be able to not just buy an Rx for 80 graphics card but do so at a reasonable price the MSRP is of course $230 us for the 8 gigabyte model right so down to business the 5/8 extr is a big beefy graphics card especially for a mid-range product for it will take up three slots so be aware of that it is quite thick and it's also quite long at two hundred and seventy five millimeters weight wise it's nothing too extreme it's certainly not going to cause any problems there nothing like the gtx 1080i cards i've looked at recently in total it weighs about 970 grams of that weight 647 grams can be accounted for by the massive cooler the cooler does they look quite impressive in my opinion and although there are still a few orange highlights they are very subtle the black plastic fan shroud looks very aggressive and while it won't appeal to all nothing ever does I have to say I quite like it the X in the center where you might expect a third fan also looks very cool speaking of fans the huge heatsink beneath is cooled via a pair of 100 millimeter fans which spin in alternate directions to reduce air turbulence and therefore operating noise gigabyte also claims this boosts heat dissipation as we've come to expect the fans will shut down completely when the card is a title and they also feature gigabytes unique fan blade design on the backside of the graphics card we find a smart looking backplate again a few subtle orange highlights here and there and of course that cute little copper insert that doesn't do much other than look cute I mean tough of course removing the cooler gives us a closer look at not just at ECB but also the cooler itself gigabytes gone with direct touch pipes to enhance the thermal transfer they also save a little on the weight and cost by going with this method opposed using a thick copper insert there's also a small aluminium heat spray attached to the base that cools the gddr5 memory and then there's a separate bank of aluminium fins to cool the vrm in total there are three series of aluminium fins covering the entire length of the card I may are connected using four copper heat pipes one of which is an eight millimeter pipe while the other three are six millimeter pipes moving over to the naked PCB we find a six plus one phase vrm which typically should be enough for a decent overclock though them offsets used here aren't the best so it will be interesting to see how far the card goes feeding in power is an 8-pin plus a 6 pin PCI power connector moving around to the i/o into the car we find a dual link DVI output HDMI 2.0 output and three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs finally out of the box the card comes clocked at a boost frequency of 1425 megahertz which is a decent six percent factory overclock over the 13 hundred and 40 megahertz spec using the Auris graphics engine software you can boost the frequency to 1439 megahertz at the click of a button and I'm keen to see how much further the card will go through custom overclocking in order to find out let's jump to the benchmarks please note for testing the latest display drivers were used on our core i7 77 okay test system clocked at 4.9 gigahertz starting off with Dawn of War three we find very competitive performance between the RX 580 rx 480 and GTX 1060 graphics cards the or SRX 580 XG l was the fastest of the lot by a whisker demonstrating very strong performance at 1080p upping the resolution or 1440p plays further into the hands of the AMD graphics cards and now the RX 580 has a decent performance advantage over the 10 60s when comparing the minimum frame rate the RS rx 5/8 extr also performed very well and rise of the Tomb Raider basically matching the msi gtx 1060 gaming X plus 6 G for the top spot with an average of 67 FPS at an EP the 5/8 extr was also 2 FPS faster than the Nitro+ though they did both deliver the same minimum of 49 fps jumping to 1440p reduced the average frame rate to 46 fps and this was the same result spat out by the MSI gaming x+ ideally gamers will want to reduce the quality settings ever so slightly to reach 60 FPS the green team enjoys a slight performance advantage in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon wildlands that said it is only very slight and in fact the RS rx 580 XJ is able to match the minimum frame rate of the MSI GTX 1060 gaming x6g meanwhile it was the fastest a media graphics card tested at 1080p moving the 1440p the 580 XG r is able to close in on the GTX 10 60s and match them with a minimum of 37 fps an average of 47 fps again those targeting 60 fps will want to reduce the quality settings ever so slightly when it comes to power consumption the Auris RX 5 ATX charge hugs that juice like a footy jock on his 18th birthday alright it's not that bad but still when compared to the GTX 1060 cards we do see more than a 20 percent increase in total system consumption that said though as I noted in my previous rx 580 vs. GTX 1060 video consuming around 350 watts for the entire system when gaming isn't that extreme and a basic 450 to 500 watt power supply will have you more than covered still low power consumption is well worth noting so consider it noted anyway moving on to the temps unsurprisingly that extra power consumption translates into added heat and here we see despite its massive cooler the Auris are x58 extr does run quite a bit hotter than the msi gtx 1060 models but said though peaking at just 71 degrees is a very impressive result and this makes the Auris card 4 degrees cooler than the Sapphire Nitro+ perhaps more impressive is the fact that at this temperature the card is virtually silent honestly I never really have much luck overclocking AMD graphics cards at least in recent times I don't know if it's something I'm doing I'm just unlucky maybe I'm just missing something or it could be because I properly vet my overclocks I've seen a few reviewers claiming here around 1480 megahertz which seems plausible and some uses the claiming 1.5 gigahertz and beyond which while possible seems less likely anyway I wasn't able to game for a short period at 1480 megahertz though it was rare I could go for more than say 10 minutes without the game crashing dropping down a 1470 megahertz would see the crashes happen less frequently but even so gaming past 10 minutes was still quite difficult to do despite the fact that I was seeing very low temperatures in the end it was the 1400 60 megahertz frequency that delivered the goods here the system remained 100% stable after more than an hour of gaming the gddr5 memory also hit 2112 megahertz which is a mild six percent overclock it was probably a bit more Headroom here I was mostly focused on getting the most out of the core in the end I only managed to squeeze three percent more out of the card hardly seems worth it even if I got to 1.5 gigahertz that's a mere 4% overclock over the cards IRA C mode and you'll likely only see gains of around 2 to 3 senso not really worth making a big deal about anyway at fourteen hundred and sixty megahertz I set the fan speed at sixty percent and this meant you could just hear the card over the case fans I certainly wouldn't have called it loud or anything like that this made the operating temperature of just fifty three degrees most impressive and just goes to show how relaxed the fan curve is on the auto profile well that wraps up my gigabyte or s RX 5/8 extr 8g review overall a solid contender from gigabyte out of the box performance is excellent making this one of the fastest rx 580 cards on the market right now unfortunately as it stands I can't really discuss pricing right now as availability is practically non-existent as a result prices are sky high I have no idea how long it'll be before price is correct we'll just have to see how long this mining boom last before we can get back to good old gaming I'd probably have a go at the mining thing that power in Australia costs a small fortune as it is anyway once pricing correction you can purchase the 580 XJR for a reasonable price then I highly recommend it as I said the AMD MSRP is set at $230 us for the 580 and that directly translates to just over $300 Aussie right now so ideally I wouldn't recommend spending more than say $260 u.s. or $350 Australian on this graphics card so just keep that in mind well that's going to do it for this one I'm your host Steve see you again soon guys