Gadgetory

if you've been waiting for an affordable graphics card that can give you a very good gaming experience then you've no doubt heard all the rumors about the AMD r x 480 that have everyone has been waiting on hearing about for a long time and you guys have been told over and over Jo June 29th June 29th you can hear about June 29th that you all kept asking how does it perform well guys I've got the 8 gig model right here I put it through a gambit of tests and we're gonna talk about that we're gonna talk about this card where it belongs how I feel about it and whether or not you should even consider it whether you're looking for a pump reservoir custom GPU block or a complete loop and a box output Kools wide range of products can make your next water cooling adventure an easy one click the link in the description for more details now quick disclaimer before we get into the benchmarks I know we promised we'd get right into it but I want you guys to understand what it is you're seeing here I use the same test I always do with all of my graphics cards and I left ashes at the singularity out not because I don't trust it the devs have actually made changes on that so the textures look the same regardless of the GPU load it's the fact that I'm still having problems with the damn benchmark for some reason getting very erratic results not what this card but with some of the other cards that I was testing with it so I'll come back to it but the other thing too is I compared it to the Sapphire 3 ATX Nitro Edition which is a custom PCB 3 ATX Nitro which was the previous last gen 380 series card from AMD and I compared it to the 970 SSC which yes is a more expensive card by more than $100 at the time of launch I don't know current pricing is this exact moment but at the time of launch it was more than $100 more than this card so why did I do that well when AMD was here I they actually came to my office here spent time with me and we went over the card so I could understand more about this card and why it exists and where it's designed to compete and I flat out asked the question who is this card aiming at who is this card trying to take down when it comes to performance they said for pricing it's aimed more right where the 960 launched for performance it's got the 970 straight in its crosshairs so did it actually compete with the 970 at a much lesser price well it's the benchmarks and find out now obviously when you look at those benchmarks you can see that in most of the test the 970 edge did this guy out by just a little bit but I want to point something out that 970 is an EVGA SSC super-super clocked so you've got the 970 reference and then you've got the super clock and then you've got these super super clock which actually has extra power phases and stuff in it so it is not a standard 970 it's actually a custom PCB with more power and more frequency in it whereas this is just a reference card now why didn't I use just a standard 970 in the test easy I don't have one so I couldn't actually go back and retest it but yeah I digress that's exactly how that 970 SSC performed when it launched versus how this is performing on the latest crimson drivers which obviously we had early access to I did ask if the drivers were gonna change between when I did my test and now and when you guys can get them and they said no so that's that's it that's that's the way you guys should be getting it hopefully as long as nothing goes wrong but as you could see in some tests - with 1440p and even 4k although this is not a 4k card neither at the 970 neither is the 380 X I just want to see how they scaled under like 100% massive load where the graphics card is just buckling under the weight of all of those pixels and it held its own very very well edging out the 970 in quite a few tests and as you guys could see at 1080 it was like right there with the 970 trailing behind it just a little bit in some tests but then just like you know completely pimps lapping in another test which is very impressive considering the card has 8 gigabytes it's a twelve hundred and sixty-six megahertz core which is the highest core clock we've seen yet from anything to come out of a Indies camp especially at this price point and that it's running eight thousand megahertz effective memory so the four gigabyte version is exactly the same it's just cut down to four gigabytes 256-bit memory bus all of that now it also has something that I thought was really neat because I opened up MSI Afterburner and I wasn't expecting this I was actually directed to go into the control center for crimson and then go into the global settings in side of where all the games are and then you actually have overclock control within the driver so it's a driver level overclocking available onto this card well you don't have to war lie on third-party software to integrate for it like MSI Afterburner or any of the other software I guess that the other companies launch you can actually do driver level overclocking with this which was very nice to see you could control things like fan curve you can even control the P States now P states are a lot like GPU boost where it's going to under certain load conditions it's going to go to a certain frequency and certain voltage control so you guys are sometimes people ask me I don't understand why it'll be in the middle of a test and then suddenly it'll drop down like a step of megahertz and then it will step up and then will step down why is it doing that well guys that's all pistes and this is something that is actually being you're giving access to now with AMD where you can actually control those P States and actually control the voltage or each one of those individually which is giving you a much better overclocking experience in my opinion now this does all of this guys at 150 watt total TDP single six pin connector as well as 75 Watts coming through the PCIe Lane 450 watt TDP it is not a power draw whatsoever now the card obviously got hot but that's a blower style cooler which you should expect from any blower style cooler with a very conservative fan curve the way it ships out of the box it would rather it be very quiet and get hot then being noisy and not as hot so I turned up the power or the fan curve to see what would happen temperatures drop down below a DC obviously the decibels of it went very high another thing I tested for with this card was coil whine and I'm pleased to announce that it is very low on coil whine it was not intrusive it was not like the fury where the fury was just coil winding like crazy I'm screeching like a banshee no this was not noisy at all in an open air test bench when it comes to coil whine one thing I want to point out though is they did remove the DVID connector from the back of the cards so if you are using a monitor and you're using a DVI cable you're gonna have to either switch over to DisplayPort or get yourself a DisplayPort to DVI adapter or something like that where you can then plug it into your card they did say that the board partners are gonna have access to solder points that are on the PCB so they can add that back so that's something you're gonna have to look for when it comes to the custom board partner cards to see exactly what they're gonna be throwing in now look at the sides that PCB right it looks like a pretty big card not well not pretty big it's a pretty decent length like average size card but you can see here the PCB is actually very short and it's very dense it allowed them to go with a bigger heatsink on here have the blower hang off the back and push air across the entire length of the card but again it's gonna be up to the board partners on what type of cooling solutions are going to come up with inevitably you know they're gonna come up with multi fan solutions that blow down on the card so it's gonna be interesting to see if it stays as short as this or if you're going to be doing custom PCB options to make it longer so they can fit all those fans on there or if they're just gonna over hang the heat seek off the back of the card and do fans across it anyway which we've seen men do in the past now one thing that AMD also advertises what this card is that it is VR capable now there's a lot of Technology going on in graphics cards when it comes to VR and I'll admit that I'm not prepared to talk about that today that is gonna be something that needs to happen on another video and now that I have purchased my HP's HTC vive I can actually do some VR testing because graphics cards go under intense load when it comes to VR and the level of consistency they have to draw the frames so if this was having any trouble it would be very very noticeable and we will check that out just unfortunately not today but I think right now if you're looking for a new graphics card and you've only got about 200 to 240 dollars to spend the fact that you came for 239 bucks get an 8 gigabyte card 8 gigahertz effective memory speed 1266 megahertz and guess what I was able to actually overclock this to 1360 that's the highest core clock I've gotten on any AMD card I have ever touched in the history of me doing this channel yeah this little guy just seems to keep surprising us and that's the thing everybody hyped this card hyped hyped hype type type type type and I hate hype train because often hype trains derail but that didn't happen here this card continued to impress me the more I played around with it doom 3 1440p high settings 60 FPS no problem whatsoever I can't wait to see what the custom cards are gonna hold from the board partners and you know I'm going to review those so keep your eyes peeled for that anyway guys we went on sale today June 29th our X 480 you guys tell me what you think did it did it hold up to the hype you know there's a ton of videos out right now about this tons of reviews so go and check those out not just don't just take my word for it please please do yourself a favor watch all the reviews or at least two or three of them to kind of get a better sampling of what's happening we all have a little bit different test methodology we all use a little bit different settings and I think it's important for you to kind of try and develop a big picture based on what multiple people were saying and not just Jay said bababa blah but there you go our X 480 I'm nicknaming this thing the little beast because it really is well as she isn't the first thing I've named the little beast but I digress so with all that said this card sits pretty much all alone in the sub $300 range when it comes to the graphics cards when I say sub 301 mean deep 199 right 4 4 gig 239 for 8 gig that's a pretty big deal and because it's sitting all alone right there in that price point that is where most people shop is right around there that well there's some statistic out there it's like 85% of people shop for graphics cards that are $250 or less right now it's all by itself so the ball is in an invidious court to see how they're gonna respond to because we all know that competition in the space is great for consumers so we need some competition out there and right now AMD clearly wins this price point for now anyway guys thanks for watching tell me what you thought let me know if this card lived up to the hype or did it disappoint sound off in the comments hit me up on Twitter or come to Facebook if you don't want to do any of those things well then hopefully I'll see you in the next video if you're new here hit the subscribe button it's um it's guaranteed way to know when I put up a video so that you can just like make fun of me that's more that's fun that's a fun pastime there's plenty of ammo waiting for you guys just to shoot alright I don't know what else I'm gonna say so I guess it's time to go alright guys thanks for watching I will see you in the next one