Gadgetory

I still remember the excitement and anticipation felt earlier this year when talking to the guys from AMD about their upcoming Polaris GPUs the anticipation only grew as we neared the launch and so too did the hype AMD made the announcement in early June that the RX 4 ad would cost us $200 and deliver r9 390 light performance this bit of news had gamers seriously hives but unfortunately for many this also created quite a bit of disappointment once the RX 4 ad landed later in the month upon release on the 29th of June it was discovered that the RX 4 ATS that everyone reviewed myself included with the 8 gigabyte models which cost 240 dollars not $200 there was still a 200 dollar model but it was the much less attractive 4 gigabyte card though as I later discovered the scenario is where the aching about our x4 ad is actually more capable than the 4 gigabyte model a few and far between even at 240 dollars - aching about our X 480 represents excellent value sadly however there have been a few issues first and foremost has been availability getting your hands on an 8 gigabyte model for $240 has been next to impossible in fact for the most part finding an RX 480 in stock anywhere has been a real challenge for most shoppers for the longest time the early Rx for ATS we could find were reference models selling for $300 or more AMD is custom board partner cards with nowhere to be found even months after the initial release finally we're starting to see custom rx for ATS and availability is improving unfortunately we aren't yet at the $240 MSRP but things are slowly heading in the right direction giving me my first look at a custom design our X 480 is MSI with a gaming X 8 a team armed with the latest generation twin froze our six cooler this new graphics card looks much like any other high end GPU from the current MSI lineup this is a great looking cooler that performs as good as it looks although this car will be considerably cheaper than the msi gtx 1070 gaming x we looked at a few months ago the cooler remains much the same in fact there are X 480 features the exact same cooler from the GTX 1060 model so it's very capable there are three heat pipes in total two of which extend from one end of the heatsink the other under the heatsink is a very large heat spreader that covers much of the PCB providing cooling for the vrm circuitry and memory chips something you might have already noticed is that MSI is wisely upgraded the six p-m PCIe power connector of the reference card to an 8-pin connector this will reduce the amount of power that has to be drawn from the PCIe slot and this means the graphics card is PCI Express compliant on the backside of the graphics card we find the same sexy backplate design that was featured on the GTX 10:17 around at the connectivity end of the graphics card we find a DVI port to HDMI ports and to display ports typically the our X 480 features to display boards so this means one has been switched to HDMI MSI has likely done this to make the our X 480 more VR friendly the only other modifications MSI is made to there are X 480 effect the operating clock speeds by default the our X 480 operates at up to 1200 66 megahertz we're the memory clock speed of 2000 megahertz MSI has left the memory alone but they have pushed the core clock to 1330 megahertz a mild 5% factory overclock with a little tinkering and aimed is what man were able to boost the core by another 30 megahertz to one thousand three hundred and sixty megahertz which is a pretty meager 2% overclock meanwhile the gddr5 memory hit the ceiling at 2250 megahertz a more impressive 13 percent overclock so with all that cleared up let's get into the benchmarks first up we have the witcher 3 and here the msi our X 480 was 5 percent faster than the AMD reference card this place had alongside the gtx 1060 found Edition with an average of 44 fps this time in Far Cry we see a 7 percent increase in performance favoring the msi card over AMD's reference model as a result the gaming X was just a single frame slower than the 1060 founder's addition the msi RX 4 ad managed to deliver an 8% boost over the reference card in star wars battlefront making it just 2 FPS slower than the GTX 1016 for whatever reason the division was a game where my AMD reference card really struggled falling 3 FPS behind the eye 9 390 I suspect throttling was the issue here anyway the msi RX 4 ad was a massive 17 percent faster than the reference card placing at 2 FPS ahead of the gtx 1060 and r9 390 the msi RX 480 was the more typical 7% faster in Mirror's Edge catalyst when compared to the AMD reference card just put it on par with the r9 390 in just a single frame behind the stock gtx 1060 efi graphics card overwatch is another game where my reference RX 4 ad was seemingly underperforming our 8 messiah card on the other hand provided 18% more performance averaging 79 FPS though this meant it was still 7% slower than the fans Edition 1016 MSI obviously feeding there are X 480 gave me X model a lot more powers the total system power consumption increased by 12% this took the system consumption to 282 once which is similar to what we saw from the r9 390 and nano graphics cards despite consuming more power the msi R X 480 ran 10 degrees cooler than the reference card given the power consumption I feel this is an excellent operating temperature for MSI's our X 480 unfortunately when it came time to overclock this card we didn't have much luck the core was increased by 30 megahertz a 2% overclock in the memory by 250 megahertz a 13% overclock this netted us 4% more performance in overwatch which hardly seems worth the trouble it feels like I've been waiting so long but I'm happy to have finally tested a high quality board partner design Rx for Eddy the gaming x HD model does a good job of showing the RX 418 the best light possible something aimed his own reference card didn't exactly do from day one I've said the AMD our x 480 reference card is pretty rubbish and this just proves it the tiny heat scene coupled with the inadequate 6 pin power input seem to provide inconsistent results in quite a few titles having found such strong performance in the division and overwatch with the MSI card I went back and retest of my reference card only to find the same lackluster performance the reference our X 480 was throttling in these titles but not to the degree that would explain such a massive performance deficit between itself and the MSI card perhaps this has something to do with the power target or there could simply just be an issue with my card either way I was very pleased with the performance the MSI our X 480 delivered and this has prompted me to put together in higher X 480 vs. GTX 1060 board partner card comparison expect a notification for that video when you're in bot shortly overall the MSI rx4 ad gaming xhg is an excellent mid-range graphics card that delivers solid performance across the board thanks to the beefy Twin Frozr six cooler it also looks very high-end while also running cool and quiet the only issue for now and it's a rather large one is the inflated price of course pour our X 480 pricing isn't limited to MSI but the gaming x 8g is one of the pricier examples right now over in the States it costs three hundred and forty US and here in Australia you can expect to pay at least four hundred and twenty s so not great given the $240 US MSRP still I expect pricing the self-correct shortly or rather I hope it will what do you guys think of the gaming x8 G 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