PowerColor Radeon RX 480 RED DEVIL review - Introduction

 PowerColor RED Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB review 
It's getting a little evil inside your PC ...

Join us as we review the PowerColor Radeon RX 480 RED DEVIL, we test the model fitted with 8GB graphics memory. This dark spawn from PowerColor is a mainstream graphics card series that will allow you to play your games in both the Full HD 1080P range as well as gaming in WQHD (2560x1440) range. And all that at a rather reasonable price of 269 USD. The RX 480 is a graphics card series that will allow you to play your games in both the Full HD 1080P range as well as gaming in WQHD (2560x1440) range. And all that at a very reasonable price as well. See, the 4 GB variant will start selling at $199 / 220 EURO whereas the price will be $239 / 260 EURO for today's tested 8 GB model. Honestly, 4GB we feel is plenty as standard for the aforementioned resolutions. Does that mean that AMD is back with a very good price versus performance product series? Follow us into this review where we'll look at temperatures, noise, performance and go with the latest game titles on the globe. It's been a somewhat wild ride for the past few months, AMD created a couple of viral moments on the web and announced stuff prior to the actual release. Hey, who can blame them. Today is all about Polaris 10, a code-name indicative of the mainstream to high-end products (but not enthusiast). Polaris 11 will see the light of day as well in the entry-level range. Though today's release is about the Radeon RX 480, Polaris 10.

For the time being, what you see above will be the product stack starting with today's availability of the Radeon RX 480. The Radeon RX 480 graphics card will be made available in 4 and 8 GB versions, you will also spot both reference and tweaked SKUs from the board partners. The GPU used in this puppy is based on Polaris 10 (XT), an Ellismere (codename) GPU based on 4th generation GCN architecture. The 14 nm FinFET+ process based Radeon RX 480 will push the product to well over 5 TFLOPS. With its 150W TDP it has 36 CUs (cumpute units aka shader clusters) x 64 shader processors per CU = 2304 shader processors). The card will be available in both 4GB and 8GB versions and has 256-bit GDDR5 memory which offers an effective 8 Gbps / GHz much like the GeForce GTX 1070. The card will run in the 1267 MHz range on its boost clock. Expect board partner cards to run a good 50 MHz faster. The GPU retains technologies of the Radeon GCN lineup such as DirectX 12, FreeSync and XDMA for CrossFire support. The GPU with its 2304 shader processors are tied towards 32 ROPs with 144 texture memory units. The initial consumer graphics card based on Ellismere (XT model) is the Radeon RX 480, the PRO model will get 32 compute units and thus has 2048 shader processors. The Radeon RX 480 is based on a much smaller 14nm fabrication process, as such you will see many enhancements in efficiency and that shows in power consumption, the reference cards will use just one 6-pin power PEG (PCI Express Graphics) header to give the the card its power. The reference boards have a 6-phase VRM power supply design and display output wise the new cards have seen an upgrade as well, including three DisplayPort 1.4 connectors and one HDMI 2.0b. AIB partners may release SKUs with a DVI connector as well, the reference PCB shows SMT traces for a DVI connector. Overall the specs show a very potent card to play the latest games with whilst offering a good memory size versus price in the 1920x1080 and even 2560x1440 monitor resolutions. 

In this review we peek at the RED DEVIL edition from PowerColor, the card is fitted with 8GB of graphics memory and has two BIOS settings, one for your default silent performance and one that opens up max clocks at 1330 MHz (1266 MHz is reference) with the memory at an effective 8000 MHz. The card has six power phases for the GPU+1 for memory and is tied towards a proper 8-pin power connector. The card is a dual-slot, triple fan solution and for something mainstream certainly looks high-end. Included as well is a back-plate.

Right nuff' said, let's fire up the review, but not before you've had a look at lucifer himself ...