Published: April 18, 2017 | Source: PowerColor | Author: Tom Logan

AMD RX580 PowerColor Red Devil Review

Conclusion

Hardware changes so rapidly, and partner manufacturers bring new bells and whistles to the table so often, that it is rare for us to be able to review the new version of an old product, but have them capable of direct comparisons. The RX 480 Red Devil is still fresh enough both in our minds and in our graphs that we still have most of the results to compare and contrast with this revised card, the RX 580 Red Devil.

After the revolutionary Zen architecture blew the cobwebs off of AMDs CPU and motherboard range, it would have been too much to expect such wholesale changes in their Polaris graphics cards too, and sure enough the RX 580 is very much an evolution of their pre-existing technology, rather than a massive revolution into hitherto uncharted waters.

One of the rules for buying a new graphics card is usually to skip a generation if you really want to extract the maximum value from your purchase, and this is definitely true of the PowerColor RX 580 Red Devil. Should you already own an RX 480 then there isn’t quite enough here to make your investment feel like you’ve brought a whole new system. Yes it is consistently 3 or 4 FPS faster than the RX 480 that preceded it, and yes it’s slightly more power efficient and this means that it is also a few degrees cooler. Lastly the addition of the AMD Chill technology, whilst very limited in the titles it supports, nonetheless means that if you down tend to play the games that are popular with the eSports brigade you’ll see significant improvements in efficiency and temperature.

However, if you have followed the “skip one” advice and are currently the owner of a 380X or lower, then the PowerColor RX 580 Red Devil offers a lot of performance for a very affordable investment. What’s not to like? That is rhetorical by the way, because the answer is “nothing”. It’s a match for the GTX 1060 and, in a couple of tests, ran the GTX 1070 close. With compact dimensions, fantastic looks, cool and quiet operation the PowerColor Red Devil is a worthy addition to any tightly budgeted gaming setup and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.