PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480 Review

AMD’s Polaris architecture recieves a touch of devilry courtesy of the PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480; featuring an impressive custom cooler and factory overclocks.

Product on Review: RED DEVIL RX 480
Manufacturer & Sponsor: PowerColor
Street Price: £259 GBP / $270 USD

PowerColor has been in the market of producing graphics cards since 1997 and has always brought innovation and creativity to the table with exciting designs year-in, year-out. Today is no exception; we have in our midst a rather special product.

The DEVIL series has been a permanent and successful fixture for PowerColor, representing the very finest in what a graphics card can offer. For those with a decidedly dark side, the RED DEVIL RX 480 seeks to appease the inner demon – boasting a custom design with triple fan configuration and two-mode factory overclock; providing gamers with a silent choice or outright performance.

Is this the best Radeon RX 480 money can buy? Let’s find out!

PowerColor on their RED DEVIL–

With its restless desire to rule the universe without seeing any light; Devil 13, the ruler of the underworld, created a new Devil to rise from the underworld and master all creatures. Red Devil as he was named , known to be the only Devil besides his creator to master all elements of the Hexagon. Controlling Fire, Lightning, Air, Magic Energy, Dark Soul, and Mirage, its presence was feared by all corners of the new world. Ever since, no one dared to challenge Devil’s true gaming empire.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RED DEVIL RX 480:

Chipset
Radeon RX 480
Digital max resolution
7680×4320
Core Clock
Silent Mode: Base: 1120MHz
Silent Mode: Boost: 1276MHz
Ultra OC Mode: Base: 1120MHz
Ultra OC Mode: Boost: 1330MHz
Memory Clock
2000MHz / 8.0 Gbps
Process Technology
14 nm
Shader Units
2304
Memory Size
8GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
256-bit
Card Bus
PCI-E 3.0
Memory Type
GDDR5
DirectX
12
OpenGL
4.5
PCB Form
ATX
Multi-view
4
I/O
1x Dual-link DVI-I
1x HDMI 2.0
3x Display Port 1.4
Suggested Power requirement
500W (8-pin external power connector)
Card Size
300mm x 100mm

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.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
ZOTAC GTX 1080 AMP! Extreme (NVIDIA 368.81)
ASUS STRIX GTX 1080 (NVIDIA 368.81)
Gainward GTX 1070 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.81)
MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X (NVIDIA 368.64)
Gainward GTX 1060 Phoenix Golden Sample (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 1060 (NVIDIA 368.64)
NVIDIA GTX 980Ti OC (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 980 (NVIDIA 368.81)
NVIDIA GTX 970 (NVIDIA 368.81)
AMD Radeon RX 480 CrossFire (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon RX 480 (Crimson 16.7.2)
XFX R9 FURY (Crimson 16.7.2)
AMD Radeon R9 390X (Crimson 16.7.2)

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

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
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 – Razer Ripjaw

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

Noise from the cooling fans on RED DEVIL render the card super-quiet – take a look and listen on our video.

Overclocking

To overclock the RED DEVIL RX 480 we used AMD Wattman inside the Crimson software suite. This provides us with extensive options to modify.

Overclocking the card was easy and we managed to boost the GPU and memory clock beyond the factory overclock applied by PowerColor. Our result took the GPU clock up to 1430MHz and modifying the memory clock up to 2100MHz. We achieved this by setting voltages to 1000 and increasing power limit to 5%. Pushing the card a little further meant we were able to receive a higher score in Unigine Heaven 4.0 which is shown below.

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

The mid-range has been geared up for one of the most eventful times the graphics card industry has experienced. With the arrival of NVIDIA’s GTX 1060 and AMD’s Radeon RX 480, choosing an obvious winner isn’t as clear cut as you’d think but with today’s release, PowerColor may have done enough to sway folks over to the red team.

The RED DEVIL RX 480 certainly isn’t for the faint hearted. The heavy satanic/demonic theme appeals to those with a dark-side and while some may appreciate the aesthetics as a master-piece in engineering those on the other side of the fence may prefer something less satanic but then if you’re investing in a graphics card which bears the name “RED DEVIL” what else can you expect?

As has been the case in previous generations of AMD graphics cards, the reference design for RX 480 lends itself to being noisy and inefficient in the cooling arena and this is where the RED DEVIL steps up to the plate. This graphics card features PowerColor’s very own triple-fan configuration which resolves those reference qualms. Though RED DEVIL may not drop the temperature as much as other custom designs, the intention here is to combat noise more than anything else. PowerColor’s objective is to provide the market with one of the quietest RX 480s available, and this they certainly achieve.

Putting the RED DEVIL into DX11 and DX12 applications reveals a faster solution than the reference RX 480 – this you come to expect from a card which utilises a factory overclock. The boost in frequency to the GPU and memory is proof that the GTX 1060 isn’t the sole option in the 1080p sector. We were able to enjoy significant increases to the framerate over the reference design and it’s clear that the RX 480 responds to some DX12 titles in a better fashion to NVIDIA’s GTX 1060. The RX 480 responds particularly well to DOOM’s Vulkan API.

Our experience with RED DEVIL is definitely a positive one but there are a few things to consider. The backplate on this card extends out beyond the PCB which in some cases could obstruct the memory slots on your motherboard (check out our video below for a demonstration). While PowerColor will be altering the orientation of the emblem on the edge of the card in a future revision, earlier editions like the one we tested features the logo in an upside down position – an oversight which should have been ironed out after inspection phases.

RED DEVIL RX 480 is priced aggressively – placing it as an attractive proposition. This graphics card arrives with a price-tag of £259.99 GBP / $270 USD. Add to the great lineup of features the 3-year warranty and the RED DEVIL is a great choice to consider.

PowerColor’s RED DEVIL RX 480 gives AMD’s mid-range the ferocious identity it screams out for — although the chosen triple fan cooler renders this card near silent. A bold factory overclock squeezes out even more performance, making this card a top-pick!

VIDEO REVIEW – VORTEZ TV

Pros
+ Provides a boost over reference RX 480
+ Features two modes
+ Comes with factory overclock
+ Low-noise
+ Overclocks even further
+ Competitive pricing
+ Good performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 3 year warranty

Cons
– Extended backplate can cause conflicts
– No option for LEDs
– 300mm in length
– Emblem upside down?!

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