Today, we are going to test AMD’s Mid-Range GPU and see if it can still perform great for 1080p high gaming in 2019. Rx 580 is one of the best mid-range GPU manufactured by AMD in August 2017, on the same Polaris architecture. It is generally known as Polaris refresh or RX 480 refresh, with the clocks, pushed higher than 480. The GPU is a budget-friendly too because of its cheap price nowadays. It performs well at price to performance ratio. Due to mining, the RX 580 and some other graphics cards vanished from the market. But now, as the cryptocurrency is down, you can find loads of them from various vendors like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Sapphire, etc. So we are going to show you its performance and our suggestions and then you can make your decision if it’s worth to buy it. Here, we are going to review Sapphire’s RX 580 8 GB Special Edition variant. Results may differ up to 1 to 2% with other variants of Rx 580.

AMD Radeon RX 580 Specifications

Sapphire Nitro RX 580 SE Box and its Contents

Front

The front side of the box has an R logo referring to “Radeon” on the top left corner. The Robot is printed on the box generally called “Nitro Mech” with some Chinese word on top middle and Nitro+ with the 8GB badge is printed on the top right of the box. On the bottom left of the box, shows the strip of GPU features and the RX 580 logo is printed on the bottom right.

Back

The backside shows all the Nitro Gaming series description, list of GPU features, GPU specifications and GPU system requirements.

Contents

• 1x Sapphire Nitro Rx 580 Graphics Card
• 1x Installation Disk
• 1x Sapphire Quick installation Guide.
• 

Nitro RX 580 Special Edition Design

Let’s take a closer look at this bad boy before proceeding to tests. The Nitro Special Edition RX 580 is beautifully designed. It features the same shroud and back-plate from the RX 480, with some minor modifications and increased dimensions. It is a 2.2 slot PCI 3.0 GPU with 260 X 135 X 43 Dimensions. The shroud is made of plastic with a metallic aqua blue color. The dots are present all over the shroud with the metal strip on the center. The GPU consists of 95mm dual wing-blade fans with translucent fins and featuring NITRO logo on the center of it. The fan features dual ball bearing for longevity and blue LED lights. These fans are capable of providing great airflow with less noise. It also supports Sapphire’s intelligent fan control, which controls the fan speed for less noise on light load and speeds up the fan on high load.

The GPU consists of a stylish looking silver/blue aluminum made back-plate with the Nitro and sapphire logo. There are holes designed on the back-plate for better heat dissipation. The backplate is simply gorgeous and is indeed one of the best-looking design on the market.

There is a BIOS switch that allows you to select between Quiet and Boost mode. The quiet mode down-clocks the GPU at 1411 MHz with a silent fan profile to operate quietly as enough at a small performance cost. The boost mode runs the GPU at full potential at 1430 MHz.

On Card’s top, there is a Sapphire logo that supports Nitro Glow technology which features beautiful RGB LED lights. You can modify the lights with the Sapphire’s TRIXX software. There are 2 heat pipes providing a decent look on GPU’s top. On the right, there are 1×6 and 1×8 power connectors.

Video Ports

Sapphire Nitro RX 580 SE supports:

• Dual HDMI
• Dual Display Ports
• Single DVI-D Port.

Sapphire TRIXX

Sapphire TRIXX is a utility software designed for Sapphire GPU’s which features

• Fan Control
• Hardware monitor
• LEDs color control
• Fan health check
• Overclocking

Fan Control

The fan control lets you customize the fan speed or make a custom fan curve for the graphics card

Hardware Monitor

The Hardware Monitor graphs everything from the GPU’s core and memory clocks, to the various fan speeds, the load the GPU and memory are under, and much more.

LEDs Color Control

This lets you change the Led lights of the Sapphire logo printed on the top of the GPU. It supports the following features.

Fan Health Check

This checks and displays whether one of the Graphic card’s fans are working fine or not.

Overclocking

The TRIXX software allows you can push the graphics card out of its limits. It allows you to increase GPU voltage, core clock and memory clock for a boost in gaming performance.

Note: Overclocking voids GPU’s warranty and also can lead to the damage of GPU components if it’s wrongly done.

Test System

As we already took a look at its Design and features, let’s move on to its performance results in games. We tested the games and benchmarks on Sapphire’s Nitro Rx 580 Special Edition which comes with the 1430 MHz boost clock and 2100 MHz memory clock. The games and benchmarks are also tested with some GPU tweaks such as overclocking at 1480 MHz core clock and 9Gbps (2250 MHz) memory clock, which gives a 2-5 FPS boost depending on game’s engine and optimization. All games were tested on the following system.

We used the Quad Core Ryzen 1500x Overclocked at 3.88 GHz at 1.385v with Corsair Vengeance LED 3000 MHz Single Channel and the results were quite good.

AMD Driver Version

We used AMD Radeon Software Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.1.2.

AMD Radeon RX 580 Temperatures and Power Consumption

Power Consumption

This is power only drawn by GPU Chip. Other parts of the GPU will also consume some power. We put GPU on the Fire Strike benchmark and took the power draw results. On overclock, there is a significant power increase and the GPU temperature was 72 with 70% fan speed which seems good.

Temperatures

We put the GPU on load with Shadow of the Tomb Raider for 20 minutes and let it cool down for 15 minutes. The ambient temperature was 22. The fans were running at 23% 1130 RPM during load which were completely silent.

AMD Radeon RX 580 Benchmarks

3DMark FireStrike

In FireStrike, RX 580 showed some great results and provides about 5.87% more performance when overclocked at 1480 core clock MHz and 2250 MHz memory clock.

3DMark TimeSpy

In TimeSpy, we get a 4.46% increase in performance when overclocked.

Unigine SuperPosition

In SuperPosition, we get a 3.89% increase in performance when overclocked.

AMD RX 580 Performance in Games

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Resident Evil 2 Remake

Assassins Creed Odyssey

Far Cry 5

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Battlefield V

PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

RX 580 Price and Conclusion:

So what do you think about this mid-range beast? This card costs around 160-200$ and 25000 PKR (Mined) to 33000 PKR (New) depending on the condition of the card. In our opinion, this card surely shows an amazing performance in the latest titles hence providing fps greater than 60 which you can see in our game test results. With its 8 GB V-RAM, this card can also withstand in the future without getting a short or limited video memory for upcoming games. If you are looking for 1080p high gaming GPU, then the RX 580 is for grabs with its astonishing results at a good price. You can find this budget beast bad boy in 26000 PKR in a good condition.

Pros:

• Budget-Friendly.
• Great performance.
• Good price.
• Nitro+ SE is beautifully designed.
• Significant FPS boost in Overclocking.
• It provides silent gaming.
• 8 GB VRAM instead of 6GB from Nvidia GTX 1060 which is limited for current generation games.

Cons:

• High power consumption and a 31% increase in power draw when overclocked.