RADEON RX 480
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| Radeon RX-480 |
2016 is shaping up to be the year of the GPU, with major advancements coming from all corners and at all prices. To recap, Nvidia has their supercomputing Tesla P100 with the GP100 GPU—not something you can currently buy as an individual graphics card, though that’s coming later this year, but it’s a monster of a chip for those that need it (read: not gamers for the time being). The GP100 represents the pinnacle of GPUs, with an estimated price per Tesla module of $12,000 (give or take). Dropping down from the stratosphere, the new GTX 1080 looks affordable by comparison, sporting a GP104 chip and delivering better-than-Titan X performance at a suggested price of $600-$700—too bad it remains out of stock (or severely overpriced) at most places. Not surprisingly, the GTX 1080’s affordable sibling, the GTX 1070, is in a similar state: it’s an awesome card that’s currently difficult to buy, particularly at anything close to the $380-$450 suggested price range (though Newegg apparently has a few cards listed as being in stock as I write this, so supply may be improving a bit).
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| Radeon RX-480 |
During all of this Nvidia love-fest of new GPUs, there has been one caveat waiting in the wings: What about AMD’s Polaris GPUs? AMD officially announced the card’s name, the Radeon RX 480, and some core details a month ago, the biggest news being the price: $200 for the 4GB model, and $229 $239 for the 8GB card. (AMD increased the suggested price on the 8GB model at the last minute, though we’ll have to see what happens with street pricing.) Today, the other shoe drops and we can finally reveal performance for AMD’s Radeon RX 480 8GB; what we can’t do is tell you whether or not you’ll actually be able to buy one, but AMD and their partners couldn’t possibly do any worse than Nvidia at keeping the new cards in stock. Yeah, that’s a pretty low bar to clear.
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| Radeon RX-480 |
Unlike Nvidia’s new GTX 10-series graphics cards where the reference model has been redubbed the ‘Founders Edition,’ AMD is sticking with reference designs for the RX 480 review samples. This is good in the sense that it means we’re not seeing a higher target price on AMD-produced cards, but it does carry the usual caveats of a reference design. Specifically, power delivery, cooling, and overclocking may be more limited than on custom AIB (add-in board) partner cards. We should see plenty of these reference cards for sale at launch, but over time the market will likely transition to custom models.
The card we received is the higher end 8GB model, which means the GDDR5 memory is clocked at 8 GT/s; we’re told the base model 4GB cards will be clocked at 7 GT/s, though partners are free to use higher memory clocks if they want. How much that will hurt performance remains to be seen—and we could see overclocking get back to 8+ GT/s. For most games, having more than 4GB of VRAM isn’t critical, particularly at the settings the RX 480 is designed to handle, but there are at least a few games that that can benefit from additional VRAM.
AMD RADEON RX 480 CORE SPECS
Transistors: 5.7 billion
Die size: 232 mm^2
Process: GloFo 14nm FinFET
Compute units: 36
Stream processors: 2304
Texture units: 144
ROPs: 32
Base clock: 1120MHz
Boost clock: 1266MHz
GFLOPS (boost): 5834
Memory bus: 256-bit
L2 cache: 2048KB
Memory: 4GB/8GB GDDR5
GDDR5 speed: 7000+/8000+ MT/s
Bandwidth: 224/256GB/s
TDP: 150W
Die size: 232 mm^2
Process: GloFo 14nm FinFET
Compute units: 36
Stream processors: 2304
Texture units: 144
ROPs: 32
Base clock: 1120MHz
Boost clock: 1266MHz
GFLOPS (boost): 5834
Memory bus: 256-bit
L2 cache: 2048KB
Memory: 4GB/8GB GDDR5
GDDR5 speed: 7000+/8000+ MT/s
Bandwidth: 224/256GB/s
TDP: 150W
Source :
http://www.techupdate.xyz/tech/the-radeon-rx-480/
