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ASRock Phantom Gaming X RX 580 Review

Rating: 8.0.

It has felt like an age since KitGuru last reviewed a graphics card. While we don't yet have a new GPU architecture to look at, we do have a new manufacturer in the graphics card market – ASRock. The company built its name making motherboards, and has now turned its hand to graphics cards. Is the Phantom Gaming X a good start for the Taiwanese manufacturer, or is it too little too late?

For its first foray in the graphics card market, ASRock is playing it relatively safe with the Phantom Gaming X RX 580. This is made clear in two main ways. For one, the card is going to be relatively cheap for a RX 580. We have been told to expect pricing at 329 Euros, which puts it at around £290 here in the UK. While we do not yet have a confirmed UK retailer listing, this would make it one of the cheapest RX 580 cards currently available.

Secondly, the card lacks a number of features we would expect from a high-end model. For instance, there is no backplate, RGB lighting, dual-BIOS, additional fan headers, or other supplementary features we have seen on other cards. This is very much a ‘back to basics' graphics card, in the sense that you just plug it in and you can be be off playing games with nothing else to think about.

GPU AMD RX 480 AMD RX 580 AMD RX 470 AMD RX 570 AMD R9 390
Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti Nvidia GTX 1060
Streaming Multiprocessors / Compute Units
 36 36 32 32 40 6 10
GPU Cores  2304 2304  2048 2048 2560 768 1280
Texture Units 144 144  128 128  160 48 80
ROPs 32  32  32 32  64 32 48
Base Clock  1120 MHz 1257 MHz  926 MHz 1168 MHz Up to 1000MHz 1290 MHz 1506 MHz
GPU Boost Clock  1266 MHz 1340 MHz  1206 MHz  1244 MHz Up to 1000MHz 1392 MHz 1708 MHz
Total Video memory 4096 or 8192 MB 4096 or 8192 MB  4096 or 8192 MB 4096 MB  8192 MB 4096 MB 6144 MB
Memory Clock (Effective)
1750 (7000) or 2000 (8000) MHz 2000 (8000) MHz  1650 (6600) MHz  1750 (7000) MHz  1500 (6000) MHz  1752 (7008) MHz 2002 (8008) MHz
Memory Bandwidth  224 or 256 GB/s  256 GB/s 211 GB/s  224 GB/s 384 GB/s 112 GB/s 192 GB/s
Bus Width  256-bit   256-bit    256-bit  256-bit  512-bit 128-bit 192-bit
Manufacturing Process 14nm  14nm 14nm  14nm 28nm 16nm 16nm
TDP  150 W  185 W 120 W 150 W 275 W 75W 120 W

Out of the box, this ASRock RX 580 runs at a stock speed of 1380MHz, which is 40MHz faster than reference RX 580 speeds. Our GPU screenshot shows the clock speed to be 1408MHz, however, as that is with the ‘OC Mode' enabled using ASRock's Phantom Gaming Tweak software.

Elsewhere, the card has 8GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 2000MHz, 8Gbps effective. With the 256 bit bus, this equates to total memory bandwidth of 256.5 (or 256) GB/s.

The rest of the GPU spec is identical to that of the original RX 480 – both have 36 compute units, 144 texture units and 32 ROPs, and both are built on a 14nm process. The TDP of this ASRock card is rated at 185W.

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