Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Nitro+ Limited Edition 8 GB

[W1zzard]

The Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ Limited Edition is a highly overclocked custom variant of the just-launched AMD Radeon RX 580. Performance now beats the NVIDIA GTX 1060, and in the box, Sapphire has bundled two user-replaceable semi-transparent fans with blue LEDs, if you want a little bit more bling.

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[Nokiron]

That's quite the increase in power consumption...

 

[ShurikN]

Consumes 100W more to achieve 5% more perf than a 1060. Guess which chip you wont see in a laptop... again.
Not to mention that it's trading blows with an equally priced custom 1060. And those cards were out for a while.

Wanted to say I'm disappointed, but my expectations were extremely low to begin with. And boy were those expectations met.

 

[RejZoR]

Would be nice if news also mad it into the Forum headlines section. I miss bunch of reviews because I forget to look down here or I miss a tweet that has been sent out for the review...

 

[newtekie1]

Consumes 100W more to achieve 5% more perf than a 1060. Guess which chip you wont see in an laptop... again.

Not to mention the worse price to performance and worse overclocking.

 

[KainXS]

The Max Power Delivery Limit and TDP increased over the RX 480 Nitro(TDP increased drastically 110W --> 180W) in the bios, thats probably why it consumes so much power.

If the Gaming X version has the same PCB as the 480's then I would probably try to flash my card to 580 to get the reduced clocks though to lower the idle power consumption.

 

[darklm]

I didn't expect anything and I'm still disappointed

This rebranding is worse than the 300 series

 

[sith'ari]

From a 1st glimpse it seems like a good mid-range GPU (*and it is a good mid-range GPU).
BUT....
1) Extremely high power consumption compared to the competition (*GTX1060) or even its predecessor (RX480)
2) Its 5% average ahead of GTX1060 reference, but that means that it will be equal with the aftermarket GTX1060s.
3) In addition to comment 2), if we add the fact that NVidia will be launching a refreshed line of GTX1060s with faster memory, then......
the results that come from thoughts 1) , 2) , 3) aren't very encouraging for AMD.

 

[horsemama1956]

I don't believe the power consumption is an issue with this class of card unless you're running a tiny it build or something. It's not 290/390 territory.

It is a nice selling point to say it's more efficient but in reality I don't really think people care when the card is under gaming load. People will whine about it on the internet but it shouldn't be a. Deal breaker for someone that just wants to game. The price is my main issue in terms of making it competitive with the 1060, nVidia can easily afford to drop the price knowing they have the 1070 and beyond basically untouchable until Vega.

 

[Solid State Brain]

Where did the multi-monitor idle consumption improvements go? That was the thing I was looking forward to seeing.

 

[ShurikN]

I don't believe the power consumption is an issue with this class of card unless you're running a tiny it build or something. It's not 290/390 territory.

The power consumption is not an issue if the difference is up to 40W or so. But when you consume almost twice the power to achieve the same performance as your competitor ... you gotta ask yourself where you went wrong.

 

[Dimi]

I'm just wondering how you got such low numbers on the 1070 Doom 1080p benchmark. I am constantly hitting the frame limit with mine on nightmare settings throughout the entire game. (yes i finished it lol).

 

[Frick]

I don't believe the power consumption is an issue with this class of card unless you're running a tiny it build or something. It's not 290/390 territory.

It is a nice selling point to say it's more efficient but in reality I don't really think people care when the card is under gaming load. People will whine about it on the internet but it shouldn't be a. Deal breaker for someone that just wants to game. The price is my main issue in terms of making it competitive with the 1060, nVidia can easily afford to drop the price knowing they have the 1070 and beyond basically untouchable until Vega.

Thing is if cards A and B perform about the same, cost about the same and make about the same kind of noise, shaving off 80W in gaming is not a small thing.

So, the 4GB RX580 is the bang/buck card to get, or the 4GB RX480 if priced lower.

 

[W1zzard]

Where did the multi-monitor idle consumption improvements go? That was the thing I was looking forward to seeing.

second chart on the power page?

I'm just wondering how you got such low numbers on the 1070 Doom 1080p benchmark. I am constantly hitting the frame limit with mine on nightmare settings throughout the entire game. (yes i finished it lol).

play it again to find a better test scene

 

[RejZoR]

It's funny how people obsess over power consumption all of a sudden. I only see that as a problem if that affects actual heat and overall noise (which is usually connected with heat). Considering this card is one of the quietest cards, who really cares? And it overclocks kinda decent. I mean, 1480MHz is quite nice clock for Polaris. And now someone will throw an miniATX or ITX build in my face. How many people seriously use those compared to normal id or high towers? They are tiny minority no one cares about.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

The power consumption is not an issue if the difference is up to 40W or so. But when you consume almost twice the power to achieve the same performance as your competitor ... you gotta ask yourself where you went wrong.

Design choices. AMD has kept the compute resources intact over GCN revisions, while Nvidia was able to dial some of it back, along with the memory subsystem, when they introduced the new compression algorithms with Maxwell. If you go back and look at Kepler and earlier, power vs. performance was darn close from both companies. AMD hasn't found an equivalent "magic bullet" to Nvidia's delta compression, so they're stuck with primarily process gains to this point.

 

[Basard]

It's an overclocked card so the power usage looks higher than it should.
Compare it to a higher than reference clocked 480 and the consumption will look more in line.

 

[Nokiron]

Design choices. AMD has kept the compute resources intact over GCN revisions, while Nvidia was able to dial some of it back, along with the memory subsystem, when they introduced the new compression algorithms with Maxwell. If you go back and look at Kepler and earlier, power vs. performance was darn close from both companies. AMD hasn't found an equivalent "magic bullet" to Nvidia's delta compression, so they're stuck with primarily process gains to this point.

The magic bullet is the tile-based rasterization, the compression does not matter that much in comparsion. Especially not in regards to efficiency.

It's funny how people obsess over power consumption all of a sudden. I only see that as a problem if that affects actual heat and overall noise (which is usually connected with heat). Considering this card is one of the quietest cards, who really cares? And it overclocks kinda decent. I mean, 1480MHz is quite nice clock for Polaris. And now someone will throw an miniATX or ITX build in my face. How many people seriously use those compared to normal id or high towers? They are tiny minority no one cares about.

I think the point really is that these results are worse than when Hawaii got a refresh.

That increased power consumption by quite a bit as well, but the price dropped by like 20 percent.

 

[Solid State Brain]

second chart on the power page?

I did check out the graph; unfortunately I saw no improvements compared to the RX480 although apparently it was supposed to be one of the points of the improved process.

 

[OneCool]

Wow. It's even worst than I expected.

 

[NdMk2o1o]

Guess I might grab an 480 when they drop in price, was looking forward to 580 but not so much now....

 

[W1zzard]

I did check out the graph; unfortunately I saw no improvements compared to the RX480 although apparently it was supposed to be one of the points of the improved process.

yeah, amd promised but didn't deliver. it's not exactly an effect of the new process, but they supposedly added intermediary power states that should be active in multi-monitor for example.

If you look at the temps page, table at the end you'll see that the card still runs full memory clocks in multi-monitor. compare that to blu-ray, where the clocks are lower and look like they reflect what AMD intended to do.

 

[kruk]

The power of this card is high, but it should be no surprise as it's clocked much higher than Polaris 10 optimum is:

Reference had 0.980 - 1.070 V, this one has 1.125 V. It surprises me however that they only increased the GPU clocks but kept the RAM speed at the same level. I thought that the RAM speed was the bottleneck for Polaris 10 ...

 

[80-watt Hamster]

The magic bullet is the tile-based rasterization, the compression does not matter that much in comparsion. Especially not in regards to efficiency.

Thanks for the correction. I had a feeling I'd gotten that wrong.

 

[etayorius]

What a useless rebrand, just grab an aftermarket RX480 and OC the hell out of it. What was AMD thinking? PowerConsumption actually went up, blegh!

If they had drop the price to $220 Max, it would had been something, also push the naming scheme one notch down and sold it as RX570. It just makes absolutely no sense.