AMD RADEON RX 480

AMD smashes the budget market once more

SURELY, THIS IS THE YEAR of the graphics card? Think about it: We have the advent of VR, high refresh rate 1440p gaming, and not one but two die shrinks all occurring within the last 12 months. But let’s face facts— it’s all well and good having $650-plus graphics cards, but what really matters is making our platform more accessible. The more people who join the PC gaming community, the more investment comes in, and ultimately we all benefit. So, let’s welcome AMD’s first 14nm Polaris offering, the RX 480.

Aimed at the mid-range market, this $240 graphics card is designed to supplant Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 970 from holding the title of value king. And, boy, does it do that with aplomb! With 36 compute units, 8GB of GDDR5 on a 256-bit memory bus, and drawing a meager 150W of power from the wall, you can expect the RX 480 to average around 5 TFLOPS of performance at stock. This places it quite nicely between the GTX 970 and the GTX 980 in terms of performance, and that’s exactly what we saw. In Fire Strike, the RX 480 scored well over 1,000 more than its pricey competitor, with only the overclocked Gigabyte WindForce coming even slightly close to matching it. In game, we saw the RX 480 dominate 1080p, scoring average frame rates of 60fps and 58fps respectively in Far CryPrimal and TheDivision, with our more testing optimized titles, TotalWar:Attila, Riseof the TombRaider, and Ashesof the Singularity, scoring in the mid 30s.

The real trick here, however, is 1440p performance. FarC ryP rimal happily reached 43fps on average, alongside The Division. Is that the ideal 60fps sweet spot? Well, no, but it’s still 50 percent better than you’d get on a console, and on top of that, you have those 1440p HD textured graphics to enjoy, as well. For those less concerned about the competitive scene, and who just want a smooth-enough 1440p budget card, the RX 480 is ideal. THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Let’s talk about that power draw. There’s been a smidgen of contention over this launch, particularly because the reference cards possibly draw too much power from the PCIe slot. This does appear to be the case, but it’s worth noting that this card has been approved by the PCI-SIG organization, the body responsible for the PCIe specification. On top of that, the likelihood of destroying any modern-day motherboard (within the last five years, at least) is very slim. The only scenario you may encounter problems from overdraw is when utilizing multiples, and we’re talking three or more here, at which point you’ll start to see diminishing returns from your investments, anyway. So who does this affect? Overclockers and ASIC bitcoin miners. By the time you read this, it’s very likely that AMD will have already released a driver to combat the concern, and aftermarket variants are available with far more advanced power solutions anyway. If you are concerned, though, we ran this card in Unigine’s Heaven benchmark at 4K over a whole weekend, only to arrive back on Monday morning to see that the card was still functioning absolutely fine.

So, on to the overclocking experience. Amazingly, for a reference blower card, the RX 480 remained cool and silent, even under load. Although the fan can ramp up to higher volumes when upping those volts, in everyday general use and stock gaming, it’s serenely quiet. We managed an overall overclock of 8 percent on the core, and +190MHz on the memory, enabling a final boost clock of 1,366MHz, and achieving a pretty pleasing 11,755 points in Fire Strike, even outstripping the GTX 980.

The question is, should you buy it? Well, as far as price-to-performance goes, the AMD Radeon RX 480 absolutely kills it. OK, it’s not the processing powerhouse of a GTX 1080 or GTX 1070, but for value for money, this card is second to none. It’s cool, quiet, efficient, and well worth it if you’re looking to create yourself a VR-ready, 1080p frame-maxing goodie.

AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB

URSA MAJOR Fantastic value; aggressively priced; strong 1080p performance; VR-ready; acceptable 1440p performance.

URSA MINOR Power draw worries at launch; superior aftermarket cards.

$240, www.amd.com