ASUS RX480 Strix Crossfire Review

ASUS RX480 Strix Crossfire Review

Conclusion

The Strix RX480 Crossfire has sent a buzz around the office. Whereas once upon a time it was almost the default setup to go with two affordable cards paired up, recent gains in the high-end models and nerfing of lower cards capabilities has meant that you were far better going with one beefy card that two middle ones.

That is definitively no longer the case.

The RX480 as a single card is perfectly fine. It’s GTX 1060 levels of performance at a very affordable price. Despite the Strix having a faster clock speed than the reference card there wasn’t much to choose between them in nearly all of our tests. However, pairing them up unlocks so much performance that today’s review ended up having the longest graphs we’ve ever used, just to ensure we could fit both the single and Crossfire results in the one graph, such is the extra performance unlocked by the multi-card setup.

It’s spectacular levels of performance. Matching the GTX 1080 in nearly every test and, in one or two, only beaten out by multi-GPU nVidia arrangements. We were left slack jawed every time we saw the benchmark result. You can get a feeling during testing on how well something performs and the Strix RX480 felt balls-to-the-wall brilliant all the time. When we then put the results into our graphs it was clear that our gut-feeling was correct and that Crossfired RX480s is definitely the way forwards if you want to stick to AMD cards. Or even just save yourself a few quid.

They look brilliant. The DirectCU III cooler is one of the best around and it combines amazing looks with exceptional cooling performance and barely audible noise levels. There is nothing not to like.If you’re on a tight budget you can buy a single card and enjoy that amount of performance and then add another at a later date, safe in the knowledge that you’ll almost double your performance. Wonderful stuff.

Built like a tank, gorgeous looks, mind-blowing performance, the ASUS Strix RX480 is unquestionably worthy of our OC3D Enthusiast Award. 

ASUS RX480 Strix Crossfire Review  

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