Hardware AMD Radeon RX 480 Review

Glad you guys got one !

 

I see there is a £32 difference between the Sapphire and Asus versions on Scan - even though they are both reference design. Can't see why you wouldn't go Sapphire - its not as if Asus are known for their fantastic after sales service or anything.

 

Looks promising - I'd probably prefer an AIBP card for a different cooler but it isn't hot and hungry and pretty much hits the rumoured performance target of the 1060 - between the 970 and 980.

I like it.

 

I hope we see soon the custom AIB ones.

 

Put a decent cooler on it, some decent power circuitry (1*6 pin is hitting 150W limit) so it can o/c and give AMD a year or two to optimise the drivers and it'll probably be coming close to 980GTX if previous history is anything to go by. Not bad for a $200 card.

That said AMD are still as screwed as ever - per/watt is terrible considering it's 14nm - it's hardly drawing any less power then a 1080 and look how much faster that is. This basically gives Nvidia all the perf/watt sensitive markets, in particular the whole mobile market again. It also gives them a really easy target to beat with the 1060 - it's more a question of how much nvidia decide to ramp up the price then anything.

Still think the whole "we are the card for VR" marketing is stupid. Hardly anyone will buy VR for starters, and of those that do no one will buy a card that low end for VR. Then all it does is promote VR comparisons with nvidia which has a custom VR stuff in pascal that polaris is missing. They should have stuck to talking about DX12 and async compute.

 

Brilliant work AMD, but still not quite enough to win the segment hands down in my mind. For the same price as the GTX970 it needed to be just that bit faster or reduce power draw ever so slightly more. DX12 performance, 8GB memory and the fact these are release drivers would sway me towards the RX480.
A second hand GTX970 looks attractive if I want something straight away but it looks like waiting for the GTX1060 could be the better option.

Any indication of folding@home performance out of interest?

 

If 1060 will never see the light of day, then it's the perfect card for mid-range gamer - which is most people.

Congrats AMD!

Wow, $199 card that can beat my 970 such is the way of technology......

 

Wonder if nVidia will respond in terms of pricing of their competing products?

 

A 1060 with 6GB of Vram and 1500Mhz core boost will trample all over these 480's.

Just a question of how dumb Nvidia will be with the price..

 

i was going to get a second hand 980ti.......But two of these little babies in crossfire is what im thinking now.

 

Its got to be 2x Rx 480 Its future proofing with DX12 much better than what Nvidia can do. Its obvious these cards are going to mature much better than the 970 and 980.

 

970 is a old card I'd hope the 480 does mature better, Why is the performance gap between the 970 and 480 so big between Hitman vs AOTS. AOTS uses all dx12 features what is Hitman not using that the gap shrinks from nothing to about 20%?

Driver optimisation ? Async?

 

I can't help but feel that the waters are very muddy right now. It seems to me that due to the high price of the 1080 and 1070 people jumped on the 480 bandwagon regardless. If we imagine an alternate reality where nVidia had released the 1060 alongside their other two cards with these exact specs and and the same price point then people would be saying that it isn't much of a performance boost or much of a price drop from the exiting 970... Yet, as it is AMD people seem to be extremely happy with the results.
It seems almost identical to the CPU situation where no matter what Intel does people complain while they consistently praise AMD.

I don't feel it is fair to compare the 970 mini to the 480 as the mini wasn't the best performing 970 and has half the memory so I would like to know how the 4GB 480 would compare... However, I don't think the 480 performs well enough to force the price drop of the 1080 and 1070 that a lot of people were hoping for.

 

It 100% won't force a price drop, people were having unrealistic expectations if they thought that. I also agree on what you have said. People say compare to reference cards and we have not saw a reference review from bit tech for anything but this of the recently released cards.

 

£650 for 1080, £450 for 1070, these about £150 increase over previous gen, i'm guessing about £270-300(970 prices), it may trample over the 480 but you'll pay for it. £200 for 1080/60+fps and 1440/40+fps(run with a freesync monitor) what's not to like.

 

970 did the same thing 20months ago? And could be had for under £250 on scan deal of the day? Performance is good yes, Is it as good as it could be? thats debate worthy.

 

Why think this will cause a drop in the new NVidia parts? It is the GTX970 that will have to drop. A 4GB (useable 3GB ) 970 is as much on Scan as an 8GB 480 which is more future proof - and also meets min VR requirements. At least the red team are going for NVidia's money machine - not the overpriced macho end. At last - real competition!

 

Nice review. Seems a decent effort from AMD at a competitive price point, that might well capture this end of the market.

 

Question: If the 480 is AMD's mass market card when are we going to see them flesh out the enthusiast market and with what sort of card? Is that going to be Vega? Next year?