Gadgetory

a few weeks ago I unbox gigabytes new rx 480 g1 gaming graphics card on the channel and quite a few of you been begging for a review ever since so today I'm delivering you that review and if you remember two weeks ago I looked at the very impressive MSI R X 480 gaming x8 G MSI's gaming X version offered vastly improved thermal strong performance that didn't suffer from any throttling and a quiet operating volume unfortunately overclocking wasn't great but we've come to expect that with this latest generation AMD and NVIDIA GPUs apart from the disappointing overclocking the only other issue is the price right now it still costs $290 which is well above the $240 MSRP though to be fair the cheapest ballpark the card of seeing cost 260 dollars for the power color Red Devil Down Under we're paying at least 370 dollars though the vast majority are priced over 400 the gigabyte our X 480 g1 gaming comes at a slightly more wallet-friendly 270 US and in Auslan that translates to 430 bucks currently gigabytes gtx 1060 g1 gaming is also selling for 270 US or 450 ozu so some stiff competition can be found at this price point having already looked at the GTX 1060 g1 gaming and extreme gaming graphics cards both of which are very impressive I might add despite some hefty price premiums I'm keen to check out how the our X 480 g1 gaming shapes up so let's take a closer look at our test subject shall we the RX 480 g1 gaming is a relatively compact graphics card measuring just 232 millimeters long and 116 millimeters tall since it's a dual slot card it measures 40 millimeters wide it has to be said this looks more like a basic windforce graphics card rather than a g1 gaming model the card is wrapped in a black plastic fan shroud with orange highlights it feels a little cheap and flimsy though it will be more than durable enough to serve its purpose attach the shroud or a pair of 90 millimeter fans using gigabytes blade fin design the side of the shroud which typically faces outwards sports 90 be backlit gigabyte logo and fan stop logo something I noticed right away was just how light this graphics card is although it is much smaller than the msi car we looked at a few weeks ago it's still actually lighter than I was expecting in total the card weighs 715 grams which sounds quite hefty until you realize that the msi card weighs almost an entire kilo at 970 9 grams making it almost 40% heavier pulling the cooler off reveals that the g1 gaming cooler weighs 400 15 grams itself so it accounts for almost 60% of the cards total weight the MSI gaming X cooler weighs 5 min 6 grams mini and accounts for a little over 50% of the cards total weight the difference being the msi is gone with a much larger PCB along with a huge heat spreader on the front side of the graphics card covering the memory chips and power circuitry still gigabyte of working with almost 20% less metal so it'll be interesting to see how this impacts the cards ability to dissipate heat the coolers are pretty basic affair featuring a single array of aluminium heat sinks measuring 205 millimeters long 70 millimeters wide and just 18 millimeters tall gigabyte is gone with a cheap aluminium baseplate though they do use smooth direct contact copper heat pipes to try and maximize thermal extraction there are three six millimeter copper heat pipes in total along with the R X 480 GPU this same cooler is also used to take care of the 8 gddr5 memory chips as well as the 6 plus 2 power phases that's a serious amount of combined thermal output that this little heatsink has to deal with as is expected from Aalborg partners gigabyte has included an 8 PN PCIe power connector to ensure the card doesn't over draw from the PCIe slot though gigabyte does appear to have gone a bit lighter on the cooling they've still included a nice full sized back plate to protect the rear side of the graphics card around at the io end we find three display ports a single HDMI output and a dual link DVI output and worse I went with a more VI friendly setup by offering two HDMI outputs but I don't have an issue with the configuration power in this card ok so Before we jump to the benchmarks let's just quickly tell clock speeds the reference clock speeds see the arcs 480 operated up to 12 66 megahertz gigabytes blown the lid off that increasing the ceiling by 1.8 9% to 1290 megahertz still I can't get gigabyte to much of a hard time here MSI with their big beefy cooler only went to 1303 megahertz anyway the memory has been left 2,000 megahertz so don't expect to see any real gains over the AMD reference card for the most part overclocking which was attempted using both what man and MSI Afterburner with various over and under voltage settings again resulted in a maximum stable overclock speed of 13 hundred and 60 megahertz I was able to gain for 30 to 60 minutes at 13 70 megahertz and even 13 80 megahertz the system would eventually crash I'm not interested in overclock so that a good to write a set of benchmarks with failed to provide 100% stability after an hour more of gameplay so by far the majority of my time on these reviews is found finding the maximum stable overclock anyway let's get on with the benchmarks starting with Star Wars Battlefront we find as expected the g1 gaming is able to hang with the game e^x making a few frames faster than our reference card Far Cry primal sees the g1 gaming match the msi card exactly along with the stock r9 390 again it was a few frames faster than the AMD reference our X 480 card again the g1 gaming matched the bigger fatter gaming X card with 47 FPS on average when testing with Mirror's Edge catalyst of 1440p the our X 480 board partner cards have really delivered in Tom Clancy's the division again gigabyte is able to match the MSI card with 49 fps making both cards slightly faster than the stock GTX 1060 this time in the witcher 3 the partner RX 4 ID cards matched the stock gtx 1060 with 44 FPS and once again the g1 gaming hung in there of the gaming x card overwatch has been used to showcase our overclock as unimpressive as it is at 13 60 megahertz the maximum stable overclock we achieve managed a 5% bump in frame rate this is in line with a 5% increase in clock speed over the factory overclocked power consumption was on par the MSI gaming X card as we saw a total system consumption of 285 watts this is comparable to the hrs Radeon r9 390 and I know nano the g1 gaming has been able to hang with the gaming apps for the majority of our tests but this result is a real letdown remember we discovered that the gigabyte card is 20% less metal in which to dissipate heat well here's the result of that downgrade the g1 gaming runs 9 degrees ha-ah reaching 80 degrees making it just a single degree cooler than the AMD reference card thankfully unlike the reference cards g1 gaming did remain very quiet even under full lobe and operating at 80 degrees that said when overclocked the fans did certainly spin up to an audible level so not not ideal graphics card for overclockers I've noticed gigabyte have been copying a lot of flack over the past week or so regarding the performance of the RX for adg-1 gaming graphics card as you might expect the operating temperature has been front and center of the drama I think at this point it's pretty much unanimous that the reference card doesn't put the RX 480 in the best possible light and well by that I mean it sucks there are a few issues with the reference card but essentially it boils down to the fact that runs hot loud and doesn't overclock worth a damn sadly the g1 gaming only improves on one of these things the operating volume as it's genuinely quiet of course the problem being it still runs bloody hot MSI however managed to create a model that not only runs very quietly but also much cooler than a DS reference card still it's not all bad news gigabyte are currently selling the g1 gaming for twenty US dollars less granted this is less than a 10% saving but for those on a tight budget that could make all the difference that said I would be very motivated to pay the slight premium for the card that ensures much lower operating temperatures overall I don't feel the gigabyte RX 480 g1 gaming is nearly as bad as some are making out yes it does run relatively hard but for those that just want an affordable graphics card to stick in their machine and forget about the g1 gaming does fit the bill you certainly aren't sacrificing any frame rate performance though if you intend to overclock then we suggest looking for an alternate option with graphics card such as the power color red devil on offer for even less money it really does make a difficult to recommend the g1 gaming model at the current asking price so what do you guys think of this gen one gaming card is it one you pick up yourself let me know in the comments I'm your host Matt as always and I'll see you guys next time cheers guys for joining me for another episode of hardware unbox so those of you that already support the channel thank you so much it's truly appreciated and to those of you that would like to support the channel directly I do have Amazon links and a patreon link in the video description below thanks a lot and I'll see you guys next time