PowerColor Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580 Review

Armed with AMD Polaris Gen 2, AXRX 580 8GBD5-3DHG/OC aka Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580 features a new double fan design and a significant overclock to the GPU.

Product on Review: DEVIL Golden Sample RX 580
Manufacturer & Sponsor: PowerColor
Street Price: £269 GBP / £269 USD

Producing graphics cards since 1997, PowerColor has always been actively involved in bringing two ingredients to the table – innovation and creativity. The DEVIL series in particular has been representative of the very best the company offers, fusing together both performance and efficiency.

Today we have in our hands the devilish delights of the all-new Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580. The Golden Sample goes beyond what the standard Red Devil is capable of, by offering an improved cooler and higher clock speeds. Unlike previous generations of the Devil series, this RX 580 variant opts for a double-fan configuration rather than the usual triple-fan – but instead we get two, larger 100mm dual ball bearing fans which promise to deliver on performance and low-noise.

PowerColor on the RED DEVIL Golden Sample

Both PowerColor Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580 and Red Devil RX 580 utilize 8GB of GDDR5 memory with 2304 stream processors and have 2000MHz memory clock speed which is connected via a new high speed 256-bit memory interface. They have the capability to switch from Ultra Overclocking to Silent Overclocking or vice versa for choosing the BIOS fitting your need, faster clocks or more balanced overclock with quiet operation. On the OC BIOS, Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580 ships with 1425Mhz core clock speed and on the other hand Red Devil RX 580’s core clock speed is 1380Mhz. On the Silent BIOS, Red Devil Golden Sample RX580’s core clock is 1411Mhz and Red Devil RX580 is 1355Mhz.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding Red Devil Golden Sample, supplied directly by PowerColor:

GPU
Radeon RX 580
Stream Processsor
2304
Video Memory
8GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
256-bit
Engine Clock
Up to 1425MHz
Memory Clock
8 Gbps
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
3x DisplayPort 1.4
1x HDMI 2.0
1x DVI
Recommended Power Supply
600W
DirectX
12 API
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Double fan w/ heatsink
Slot Size
2.5
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
240mm x 130mm x 55mm
Accessories
User Manual
PCI-E Power cable x1 (Two 6pin to 8 pin)
Driver CD

Detailed Look & Video Review

For this review we’ve produced a video review over on our YouTube channel which details all of the included features, and takes a close look at the PCB/cooling solution along with the addition of some gaming benchmarks. Please check out our video review or hit play on the video below:

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

[bGraphics Cards on test:
PowerColor RED DEVIL Golden Sample RX 580
ASUS STRIX GTX 1070
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470
NVIDIA GTX 1060
NVIDIA GTX 980
NVIDIA GTX 970
AMD Radeon RX 480
XFX R9 FURY
AMD Radeon R9 390X

Special thanks go to Epiphan, Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99A Workstation
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Epiphan AV.io 4K

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

Under load, the cooling fans on the Golden Sample sit at 1400 RPM (40%) when on auto. This is very quiet as shown in our video: https://youtu.be/G0ntw9Fum7M?t=10m28s

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

When we first got word of AMD’s RX 580 launch, like many, we held out at the possibility of some true next-generation technology by way of the long awaited AMD Vega. Sadly, this did not come to pass and instead, with RX 580, we’re faced with a slight modification to current Polaris architecture. For the true gamer and tech enthusiast this comes as a disappointment, but looking on the bright-side, we’ve seen some impressive performance figures in today’s review.

PowerColor’s Red Devil Golden Sample RX 580 is an excellent showcase of how the new 500-series can deliver an effective rival to NVIDIA’s mid-range GTX 1060 (and in some cases even GTX 1070). Our Golden Sample card handled DX12 games with ease and even proved an impressive level of prowess at 1440p and 4K resolutions. The Vulkan tests in Doom revealed how capable AMD’s graphics cards are at coping with this API and demonstrating significant favour for the red team. Against the RX 480, the RX 580 is certainly more of a worthy competitor to NVIDIA’s offerings – however if you already own an RX 480, users are likely to experience only marginal advantages by investing in an RX 580. The target audience for this graphics card is more or less those system builders who have skipped a generation and are still using a product which is 2-3 years old (AMD 300 series or NVIDIA 800 series).

Taking the actual design of the Golden Sample, the cooler which PowerColor has engineered is excellent. The build quality is top-notch and a thick metal backplate further emphasises how solid this graphics card is. In-game, PowerColor’s heatsink presents us with a low-noise, low-temperature solution and one which avoids the brazen RGB lighting which many brands are currently indulging in.

While the Golden Sample may be short in length – allowing for good computer chassis compatibility, it is quite a wide card (130mm) and may present some issues if you do have a case which is particularly narrow. The cooler on the Golden Sample is somewhat different to the standard Red Devil and it bears a slightly taller heatsink – as a result this will extend out across the motherboard, meaning the card will consume 2.5 slots in total.

Another factor to be aware of is the power consumption – RX 580 draws more power than the RX 480 and requires a 600W PSU to safe-guard stability.

PowerColor’s Golden Sample is currently on preorder at a cost of £269 GBP / $269 USD, making it a good value for money graphics card and a good choice if you’re currently weighing up whether to opt for NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 or an RX 580. This particular card provides 3 years warranty which should help to sweeten the deal.

AMD’s new RX 580 is a great choice for gamers wanting an alternative to the GTX 1060/1070 and PowerColor’s Golden Sample can be regarded as a triumph so far as gaming performance and thermals are concerned!

Pros
+ Aggressive styling
+ Well-made, solid construction
+ Excellent performance
+ Great value for money
+ Ready for 4K/VR
+ Very quiet under load
+ Low temperatures
+ Physical switches for LEDs/BIOS
+ 3-year warranty

Cons
– Takes up 2.5 slots
– Wide on dimensions
– Requires 600W

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.