Introduction

In November last year, AMD announced its Radeon RX 590 graphics card, which was an unexpected surprise at the time. It is based on the "Polaris 30" silicon, which is essentially a "Polaris 10" die built on the latest 12 nm FinFET node at GlobalFoundries, yielding significant energy-efficiency dividends AMD is cashing in on to increase clock speeds by 15 percent. The engine clock has been dialed up to 1545 MHz compared to the 1340 MHz of the RX 580.

Unlike the RX 580, the RX 590 only comes with 8 GB of video memory (no 4 GB variant), and the card's memory setup is unchanged: 8 Gbps GDDR5 over a 256-bit wide memory interface, which yields 256 GB/s of bandwidth. The "Polaris 30" silicon features the same core configuration as its predecessors with 2,304 stream processors spread across 36 compute units, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. There's no ray-tracing machinery to rival RTX, or other new features.



In this review, we're taking a look at the ASRock Radeon RX 590 Phantom Gaming X, which is is a highly cost-optimized variant of the RX 590 that still comes with a factory overclock to 1560 MHz Boost, which is comparable to other RX 590 cards on the market. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Priced at $250, the ASRock RX 590 Phantom Gaming X is the most affordable RX 590 on the market at this time.

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

• Graphics card
• Driver disc
• Documentation

The Card

The ASRock RX 590 uses a fairly long board design that is dominated by black and gray, with red highlights, and a metal backplate is included, too. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 11.5 cm.


Installation requires two slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include two DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0b, and a dual-link DVI-D. The DVI connector has no analog wiring, so D-Sub dongles won't work and an active adapter has to be used.


The board uses a single 8-pin power connector. This input configuration is specified for up to 225 watts of power draw.


The Radeon RX 590, like every other current AMD GPU, supports up to 4-way CrossFire X via PCIe.

Disassembly

ASRock's heatsink provides cooling for all important components: GPU, memory, and VRM circuitry. It uses three heatpipes to quickly move heat away from the GPU surface.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.