Introduction

AMD's Radeon RX480 Series was released in late June and is the company's first graphics card based on its new "Polaris" GPU architecture, and its first chip built on the 14 nanometer FinFET process. It is also the first AMD GPU made at GlobalFoundries, which is a deviation from the year-long relationship with TSMC.

The silicon driving the RX 480, which is based on "Polaris," is codenamed "Ellesmere" and is externally referred to by AMD as "Polaris 10". Polaris 10 on the Radeon RX 480 comes with 2304 shaders enabled, 144 texture units and 32 ROPS that are connected to a 256-bit wide memory bus with 8 GB GDDR5 memory.



In this review, we are taking a first look at a custom-design Radeon RX 480 version. This one is by ASUS. The ASUS STRIX series is well known and covers pretty much every segment of the graphics card market. ASUS uses a dual-slot, triple-fan thermal solution with heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU.

For this generation of STRIX cards, ASUS has included RGB lighting, which includes a backlit ASUS ROG logo they integrated into the backplate.

We are reviewing the RX 480 STRIX OC Gaming today, an overclocked version of the regular RX 480 STRIX that's also available, which uses the same design but comes at reference clocks of 1266 MHz.

Exact pricing is unknown. Graphs in the review use an estimated price of $259, which is $20 more than the 8 GB RX 480 reference-design price.