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Following on from our launch day coverage of Sapphire's RX 590 Nitro+ Special Edition card, today our attention turns to an RX 590 offering from XFX.
With a very ‘interesting' name, shall we say, the RX 590 Fatboy is certainly going to grab your attention. Priced at £250, too, it is one of the cheaper cards we have seen based on AMD's new 12nm Polaris technology. Is it worth buying?
When RX 590 launched on November 15, we were told to expect a $279 MSRP, and here in the UK most RX 590 cards are around the £250-270 mark. That puts this XFX RX 590 Fatboy 8GB at the cheaper end of the spectrum, and it is safe to say you don't get a whole lot of features for your money – there's no RGB lighting, the cooler and overall design is quite basic, and XFX doesn't even produce its own GPU overclocking utility.
Can this card stand on its raw performance alone, or are there better options out there? Let's find out.
| GPU | AMD RX 590 | AMD RX 580 | AMD RX 570 | Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti | Nvidia GTX 1060 |
| Streaming Multiprocessors / Compute Units | 36 | 36 | 32 | 6 | 10 |
| GPU Cores | 2304 | 2304 | 2048 | 768 | 1280 |
| Texture Units | 144 | 144 | 128 | 48 | 80 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 | 48 |
| Base Clock | 1469 MHz | 1257 MHz | 1168 MHz | 1290 MHz | 1506 MHz |
| GPU Boost Clock | 1545 MHz | 1340 MHz | 1244 MHz | 1392 MHz | 1708 MHz |
| Total Video memory | 8192 MB | 4096 or 8192 MB | 4096 MB | 4096 MB | 6144 MB |
| Memory Clock (Effective) | 2000 (8000) MHz | 2000 (8000) MHz | 1750 (7000) MHz | 1752 (7008) MHz | 2002 (8008) MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 256 GB/s | 256 GB/s | 224 GB/s | 112 GB/s | 192 GB/s |
| Bus Width | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 128-bit | 192-bit |
| Manufacturing Process | 12nm | 14nm | 14nm | 16nm | 16nm |
| TDP | 175 W | 185 W | 150 W | 75W | 120 W |
Despite AMD not releasing a reference RX 590 card, reference specs were announced, with boost clocks going up to 1545MHz. This XFX Fatboy improves on that, as it ships with a 1580MHz boost clock. Unlike the Sapphire RX 590 we reviewed for launch day, however, this XFX has left the memory at the stock 2000MHz.
