Should I buy the XFX radeon 480 8gb version for 230$

[johanisgaming]

Hey guys the 480 is on sale on new egg at 230 and i was looking to buy a graphics card. Should i buy this one or spend an extra 20 and buy a different one. I know the blower style cooler might make the card run hotter but I would like your opinion. here is the link to the card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16814150770 i just want to play at 1080p ultra settings.

Edit: the powercooler red devil card is also 230 should i buy that one instead.

 

[Plumboby]

the rx 480s 8g are prety good go with it just make sure your case has heaps of cooling to suit nvidia been hit or miss atm

 

[johanisgaming]

the rx 480s 8g are prety good go with it just make sure your case has heaps of cooling to suit nvidia been hit or miss atm

I have the s340 and its packed with fans but which one should i get ? the powercolor one?

 

[Rogue Leader]

You don't need "heaps of cooling" AMDs are not heat generating devices like the past.

Anyway I have the XFX RX 480 reference card, its good but the fan can get a little noisy and it doesn't perform or overclock as well as the powercolor. For the same price I would buy the Powercolor, personally.

 

[scout_03]

adding this also use the new wattman part in the crimson driver to reduce power use by gpu when not needed .

 

[JackNaylorPE]

They do in fact need a PSU that is 100 watts bigger and an extra cooling fan would be appropriate to remove the extra heat....a s for the noise, nothing that can be done about that w/o increasing heat. Just make sure ya get one with an 8 pin power connector and thereby avoid any power overdraw and throttling issues


There are distinct advantages to several of the AIB cards:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/RX_480_Gaming_X/28.html

MSI's Radeon RX 480 Gaming X is the first Radeon RX 480 that manages to impress. Out of the box, the card is overclocked to a frequency of 1303 MHz, which is not a lot higher than the AMD reference of 1266 MHz, but throttling is reduced, which effectively increases clocks by 50 MHz when looking at the average clock in gaming states. As a result, the card is 4% faster than the RX 480 reference and 6-7% slower than the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 1060, and Radeon R9 Fury, which all have roughly the same performance at 1080p. It would have been nice had MSI also overclocked the memory, since the memory chips can certainly take it, as our manual testing shows.

Nearly all board partners have thus far either struggled to properly configure their fans or come up with a cooling solution that successfully manages to deal with the heat output of AMD's RX 480 GPU. MSI's RX 480 Gaming X, however, acts like most other MSI Gaming cards; unpack it, install it into your case, install the drivers, and you're done. No matter which game you throw at the card now, its noise levels are a quiet 31 dBA, which is still noticeable, but better than what most people expected custom RX 480 cards to deliver after the recent reality check.

Despite good thermal and acoustic performance, power consumption is the MSI RX 480 Gaming's weak point. In typical gaming, the card draws around 200W, .....Given the reference design retails at $239, this $25 increase is not unreasonable if you consider how much better the MSI RX 480 Gaming X performs in every single test in this review. In my opinion, this is thus far the only RX 480 that looks like it can compete with the GTX 1060 and its custom designs.

As to the relative speed comments, AMD has caught up a bit (Average Performance Gain: +2.1% @ 1080p) with their most recent driver release..

There's a power reducing utility in the latest driver release but as has already been shown here, the impact on power is far less than the impact on performance.