Gadgetory

excellent there's been a massive amount of hype and anticipation around the AMD radeon rx4 80 launch so now that we can actually review the cards let me give you guys a short version right up front the RX 480 is a very good graphics card for 200 or $240 for the 4 or 8 gig versions respectively its performances in the GTX 970 range and it has some compelling next-gen features to improve VR and asynchronous compute performance it's not going to beat a gtx 980 or 1070 unless maybe you get two radeon RX 4 IDs and i'll think about doing a crossfire video if you guys maybe think about hitting that like button and it's pretty darn quiet at stock fan speeds as well overclocking is possible but not a ton of headroom and yes there will be benchmarks later in this video that have overclocking numbers and all that good stuff but first the card itself it's black got some red accents on there nothing too blingy with the reference are X 480 no lights design cues were taken from the fury and fury X line and I actually think I like it it's pretty subtle it could use a backplate though but some add-in board manufacturers like FX FX and Sapphire are already outfitting theirs with them or so I have heard the shroud is made of black plastic with glossy parts where the red Radeon logos are and a rubberized panel across the front with a grid of dots across it for some texture the PCB seen from the back is short which means we couldn't see some very small versions of this card in the future the rest of the cards 9.5 inch or 242 millimeter length is taken up by the blower style fan with its metal housing it's open on both sides so you can kind of see through it like my facade of calmness and composure the GPU beneath that cooler is the Polaris 10 XT it's based on brand-new GCM 2.0 14 nanometer FinFET architecture sports 2304 stream processors 36 compute units up to 5.8 teraflops of raw compute performance and just a 150 watt board power hence only requiring a single 6 pin PCI Express power connector the card I'm using today has 8 gigs of 256 bit gddr5 memory at 8000 megahertz effective clock speed video outs are on hdmi 2.0 B and 3 DisplayPort 1.4 s meeting support for very high resolutions and refresh rates like 4k a hundred and twenty Hertz as well as HDR displays via that display park action which can display way more colors than standard dynamic range displays so this card is ready for next-gen monitors AMD has a lot of Technology wrapped up in our X 480 and of course you still get support for legacy stuff like free sync and Vulcan a new feature called framerate targeting control allows you to set a maximum frame rate limit for games like csgo that don't need a lot of GPU performance that's just to save power which seems like a good idea but let's quickly talk about asynchronous compute asynchronous just means out of order basically and it's allowing the GPU to dynamically handle different tasks like graphics or GPU compute without having to wait for one or the other to finish the Polaris architecture has dedicated Hardware called asynchronous compute engines which are specifically designed to do these tasks at very high speeds since VR naturally has a lot more asynchronous compute tasks involved such as head mounted display tracking that needs to be updated very late in the processing pipeline having dedicated Hardware available means the our X 480 has better than expected VR performance for its class VR benchmarking is still in its infancy but the steam VR performance tests can give us an idea of where these cards stand and the rx 480 is well within that green zone for fully VR ready i over clocked my rx 480 by 5% and I got the memory up to 80 to 20 effective clock speed I did this with wot man the overclocking utility that's built into the Radeon crimson software which has come a really long way in the past year or so it's a lot cleaner the UI is pretty easy to figure out and you can use the Whatman utility that's built into it to assign specific overclocking profiles to different games overclocking itself is handled by adjusting a frequency curve with different overclocks and voltages available for each power state you can use a slider to adjust the curve as a whole or in manual mode you can assign different frequencies and voltages independently you can also control fan speed and temperature based on target and Max values there's a power limit option which is down in the temperature section for some reason which is kind of confusing at first but I figured it out and there's a nice histogram at the top that shows GPU activity frequencies temperature and fan curve it was enough for me to use for monitoring during my OC testing so I think the Radeon team has done a pretty good job here my only complaints would be that I'd like to see unlocked voltage you can't go higher than the 1150 millivolt max setting that it starts off with and it's also in need of a profile system so you can quickly save and load overclocking settings at last it is time for benchmarks here's my 59 30 K based testbed system specs and the cards I'll be comparing the RX 480 to choosing comparison GPUs is not easy for something like this but ultimately I decided that the gtx 970 and the gtx 960 for gig would be the closest competitors on team green and I threw them 1070 in there just because I wanted to see where the upper tier cards were sitting by comparison remember the 1070 costs twice as much as the RX 4 80 right now since I have stock and overclocked numbers for the RX 4 80 I chose all aftermarket cards for the Nvidia competition that have healthy reasonable but not insane over clocks from the manufacturer I also have included 4k numbers just to see how the 480 performs even though it's more suited for 1080 and 1440 gameplay in my opinion time for some benchmarks so what have we learned from these benchmarks well first the rx 40 stomps all over the gtx 960 4 gig and it hangs pretty darn close to the 970 and even beats it in a few games the 970 also shows that limitations when using 3.5 gigs of VRAM or more such as in the hitman benchmark scores and several other 4k scores as well tomb raider ashes at the singularity and hitman are all DirectX 12 titles shown here as well and while the differences weren't stark except for maybe a hitman which is an AMD gaming evolved title which might have some to do with it I think the async compute bonus did help the 480 pull out a few more wins over the 970 temperatures were normal for the 480 and by normal I mean they hit the target temperature of 80 degrees Celsius peaked at 83 degrees not the coolest running card but I can't see potential for third-party coolers to help with this and the fan noise even at that temperature was not bad at all as for frequencies pretty much every GPU that I tested throttled frequency to some degree except maybe the 960 after warming up to max temperature the RX 480 overclocked hit 1330 megahertz but only fell off maybe 30 to 60 points under full load with about the same result at stock not bad but I'm really curious to see how fast the 480 could run with better cooling as for fan noise I was quite pleased with the stock profile and AMD was true to their word that they didn't want a noisy reference cooler unfortunately I had to ramp up the fan to get any reasonable overclock going so here's a listen to the fan at idle here's the fan under load still using the stock profile here's the fan set manually to 70% and here's the fan at 100% where yes it does get quite finally some power draw results and given the performance I am happy to say that Radeon has really stepped up when it comes to efficiency our X 480 does a great job and is pretty much equivalent to the 970 its conclusion time I kind of started this video out with a conclusion but to reiterate very good graphics card for 200 to 230 dollars compelling next-gen VR and async compute features pretty quiet ok overclocking I think the only way you'd be disappointed with this card is if you were reading all the articles or watching all the pre-launch type videos talking about it beating the 1070 or 980 and running it 15 or 1600 plus megahertz the price is great and it needed to be to hit in video where they were lacking that substantial gap between the 960 and the 970 the cheapest 970 s right now are still 260 plus dollars and I think that price will definitely be coming down to stay competitive even if that happens the extra vram the VR readiness and the hardware async compute features of the RX 4 80 would still make it a very tough choice and hey one last plus for AMD is stock availability as these cards should actually be available everywhere today launch day so you could actually buy one which is helpful when you want a new graphics card if I were to ask for more I would have liked to see it overclock a bit more as I to read the rumors and had a bit higher hopes the temps are a bit warm too but perhaps with binge GPUs aftermarket coolers and Driver refinements that we should be seeing in the coming weeks we will see improvements to those numbers if you are looking for a 200 to 250 dollar GPU with very solid performance plenty of VRAM support for next gen displays an HDR and especially if you've been looking at try VAR but you haven't been able to afford it I definitely recommend at the RX 480 links to this card on Amazon as well as my pulse hardware store are down below where you can buy shirts and stuff hit the like button definitely if you enjoyed this video and get subscribed and as always thank you very much for watching