Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

PowerColor has a bit of an evil offering with the Red Devil edition RX 480, in its basis it is a nicely performing product for the money with a proper cooler, backplate and some extras. I however am a little worried about the Devil branding ? I mean if you release something really special like an enthusiast class dual-GPU card and want to create buzz I can understand you go a little dark and evil with branding. Making it a default part of your product line with Devils naming and Pentagram logos (or was it the star of David?) embedded I dunno man. I am a little afraid that it in fact will cost them some sales as this stuff doesn't sit well with a lot of religious people. So I'd strongly suggest that PowerColor will keep this comment in mind for their next product launches. Now, let me crank that up a notch, you can now also be part of their exclusive Devil club - as Red Devil card users will be the first ones to enjoy Devil Club membership which will offer speedy support with live chat, downloads, news etc exclusive for them. Again, you are really joining a program called the Devils Club. Ah well, evil comments aside the hardware itself then. By positioning the Radeon RX 480 in a more mainstream segment AMD has made a tremendously effort, as they are offering high-end performance at a very good product price positioning. Like a bat out of hell (hey I find the pun appropriate and within context :) Nvidia had to answer with the GTX 1060. Both GPUs however are limited in volume availability and that stil is driving up prices like crazy.

Aesthetics

The Red Devil RX 480 cards are a bit of a beast (yes I did it again) and have a bit of a nice dark feel (and again) to them with dark design and black/red coloring. Honestly, I think the product looks terrific arguably with and without the pentagram and devil logos. Once you have it in your hands it certainly feels like you are purchasing something high-end though. Being on the value side of the product stack is is nice to see the card has a back-plate. Overall it's just a nicely looking, sturdy product. 

Performance

Performance wise you just cannot be anything other than thrilled about the Radeon RX 480. Now, the card is a bit all over the place; extremely fast in fill-rate limited games, a little less with GPU stringent ones but overall you are looking at a product that competes with the GeForce GTX 970 and sometimes even 980. What was baffling to see though is that this 8GB model is often spot on in performance with the Radeon R9 390 series and thus R9 290 series as well. And that actually might be a problem. See, many of you are already in the 390 or Fury series and seen from that product perspective, the RX 480 will offer nothing new other than a few features. However, as we rewind that to where you are on a 280/280X/280 series graphics card, well, for 199 or 229 USD you are in for a treat in terms of performance and value. Let's not forget about other features; the Radeon RX 480 and Polaris 10 overall will offer proper performance, Eyefinity features and PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all the other stuff like HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.4 with HDR support and so on. The Radeon RX 480 series is a proper DirectX 12 product right from the get-go and has that little extra bite thanks to an increased number of shader processors (2304).

Who Would The Radeon RX 480 8GB Be Best Suited For?

As always, the answer to that question is a little complex. I would say that you'll need to look at your monitor and game preferences first and foremost. This card at its given price range makes quite a lot of sense right now for 1080P and 1440P. It is a very capable 2560x1440 resolution gaming graphics card and it obviously makes for a truly excellent 1080P card as well. Especially at that monitor resolution the card makes so much sense. But granted, at WQHD (2560x1440) most games run well enough. Another benefit is that at least the most elementary and arbitrary DirectX 12 Feature levels are supported in hardware. Even on very harsh-on-the-GPU titles you'll refrain from un-ticking graphics quality options to gain on framerate performance, there's very little trade-off to be made as the RX 480 will deliver enough. In short, for the money this is an excellent 1080P and a proper 1440P card that will often offer a nice 40~60 FPS experience at WQHD and proper image quality settings. It has plenty of muscle and has the graphics memory to deal with it, even with the best quality settings and some niche AA levels. Resolutions after 2560x1440 will be more complicated. Price to performance wise one should also take Crossfire into consideration. However, with multi-GPUs also comes 0-day driver issues with game releases. We'll test it at some point but two Radeon RX 480 cards set up in Crossfire might be a very sweet solution for Ultra HD gamers or the ones who like to go a little nasty with VSR and, of course, the latest gaming titles. Performance wise, most games will run seriously well at the very best image quality settings at 2560x1440. And sure, the cool factor remains that you get the advantages of an 8 GB framebuffer (if you opt for that model). With 8GB we feel the card is rather future proof as well. 

Pricing

Value wise the Radeon RX 480 is simply making a lot more sense compared to anything the market currently offers. I think anyone will agree with me on that. Nvidia has been driving the prices upwards, and, being a bit of an underdog, AMD traditionally always tries to offer that little extra value wise. The Red Devil edition does come with a bit of a price premium due to its design, 269 USD for the 8GB model as shown in this article.

Cooling and Noise levels

When you purchase this card, I assume everybody will use the fastest BIOS mode at 1330 MHz as the slower mode makes no sense at all as even at the OC mode is in fact is completely silent.  The temperature limiter for the reference products is set at 80 Degrees C, much like the competition. The Red Devil is silent, period. The cooler itself works really well, the card however does exhaust its hot air inside the PC, the vent at the monitor IO plate is not used at all. The card did not make any coil whine noises.

Power Consumption 

The board is rated by us at roughly 150 Watts TDP, that means when you completely stress it, that's the power consumption. Our measurements showed that the board TDP is indeed roughly in that Wattage region, we measured a little higher but with some games also noticed lower wattages. The move to 14nm FiNFET obviously is testimony to a great perf/watt ratio. We feel that at ~160 Watts the card is consuming very reasonable amounts of power for this kind of performance. No complaints here really.

Overclocking

The card in OC mode is running 1330 and that unfortunately means there isn't a lot of room left for tweaking. Nvidia recently made a move towards a more complicated way of overclocking, more restrictions, more sliders more complication. Unfortunately AMD is mimicking that. The new overclocking features are pretty much a 1:1 copy of what team green did. I wish they wouldn't have gone there as, honestly, I do not like the Nvidia implementation one bit either. Give me a voltage slider, a MHz increase (offset) and fan control. That's what I want and need, not the endless unneeded nonsense that both teams now have implemented. Overclocking wise we could get the card stable at ~1375 MHz. The 1375 MHz is pushing it though. The memory will reach anywhere from 8.8~9.0 Gbps (for the 8 GB model). Overall these are satisfying results albeit we needed extra cooling and that created more noise.

Final Words

I like what PowerColor did with the hardware, they took the RX480 and added a proper cooler, proper OC mode and a back-plate to it. Also huge props for the inclusion of a DVI connector. The Devil theming I already mentioned, it might actually work against them ? I really feel that this type of branding should be reserved for the really special and exclusive stuff but also understand that product differentiation compared to other brands is very important. Anyway, the hardware. Anyone looking for an affordable upgrade to a WQHD capable graphics card coming from say a 280/380... well, this card series will offer killah value for money. 269 USD for this version is merely a tenner over reference and that makes this a mainstream product. Other than that, the Radeon RX 480 8GB is obviously a little gem for the serious gamer with a proper monitor as it just oozes value. A nice plus is the relative lower power consumption. We consider the Radeon RX 480 4GB and 8GB to be a first run in the new high-end performance cards. The Polaris 10 architecture seems very sound and proves it can deliver big-time whilst remaining in line power consumption wise, we do think it is merely a small iteration over GCN Generation 3, the die-shrink with 14nm FinFET is the biggest benefit in terms of relative performance and wattage. Heat and noise wise I'd like to declare the product as 'proper', custom cooled AIB products for the win. The Red DEVIL Radeon RX 480 is, overall, a little evil beast for Full HD and even WQHD gaming combined with the better image quality settings, as well as for its features and aesthetics. Rapture is upon you as the Red Devil RX 480 8GB is a bit of an evil product yet comes recommended by Guru3D.com with an appropriate award And let me close this line in style ...

Hell, why not ?

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