XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy Core Edition, 8GB GDDR5, DVI, HDMI, 3x DP

Obwohl AMD keine komplett neue Grafikkarte entwickelt hat, ist es dem Hersteller einmal mehr gelungen die Polaris-GPU zu optimieren. Der Leistungszuwachs von rund 10 Prozent bei weniger Leistung ist gut und verdeutlicht den Schritt in die richtige Richtung.

Although AMD has not developed a completely new graphics card, the manufacturer has once again managed to streamline its Polaris series. The increase in performance of around 10%, while consuming less power is very decent and is a step in the right direction.

The Radeon RX 590 is more of the same that we have been testing well over two years now. Yes, performance went up a notch, yes the card still works very decently in Full HD and Quad HD resolutions and yes it tweaks nicely. The technology, however, is getting more dated. So for the RX 590 to be a success pricing needs to be great, AMD targets this as a 269 to 279 USD product. Relevance wise, hey the product is faster than a GTX 1060 overall, and NVIDIA is charging you 250 bucks for that. In closing, Polaris remains to be a sound architecture. Strictly speaking from pure shader engine performance it's still a product that performs really decent in 1080p and well enough in 1440p. So if you have not upgraded in the past 3 years, hey it might be the product you are looking for. While performance is all the same and in line with other brands we do recommend you a card with some better cooling though. While it will not be a huge issue for the card, the XFX cooling solution is rather sub-standard compared to other brands as the card runs a bit too hot in pale comparison, that is backed by what we are seeing on the thermal images. Then again, if XFX prices this product incredibly cheap it might turn out to be a proper value offering, make sure to vent your PC well though.

Power consumption of the XFX RX 590 is a good deal higher than previous Polaris products, also higher than the Sapphire RX 590 we tested today. It seems that all the improvements from the 12 nanometer process went into reaching higher clocks instead of reducing power consumption. XFX also made some changes to the VRM and operating voltage (to ensure OC stability), which both resulted in increased power draw. This is a reasonable approach since in this segment, performance is very important, and beating the GTX 1060 is a must to make the RX 590 a success.