ASUS RX480 Strix Crossfire Review

Introduction

The RX480 provided a real boost to the Radeon range, providing great performance at a very affordable price. If you’ve been in the gaming world for a little while you’ll know that one of the best things you can do is to take two affordable graphics cards and combine them into one behemoth.

Or, in other words, welcome to the ASUS RX480 Strix Crossfire review.

If the Radeon RX480 had a slight flaw it was the same one that we always see with AMD cards, the cooler. By looking at any partner card you’re guaranteed to get a better cooler and, hopefully, better performance. In the case of the ASUS Strix and its DirectCU III cooler that is definitely the case. We haven’t met an ASUS Strix product we didn’t like yet, so hopes are high that if anyone can make the most of the Polaris architecture then ASUS are the very people.

It’s also a great chance to see how the RX480 does when paired up with another. After all, whilst the RX480 was great value for money, it wasn’t exactly a GTX 1080 killer. Not that it was meant to be. Two of them however…

Technical Specifications

We don’t think there is much extra performance to be squeezed from the RX480 GPU. After all, the reference card was clocked at 1266MHz, and this all-singing Strix is only 1330MHz in OC mode, with the gentler Gaming mode a mere 20MHz behind that. 

Although when we have two of them, clock speed becomes less important anyway.