XFX RX 590 Fatboy 8GB Review – better than Sapphire Nitro+ ?

1. Introduction2. XFX RX 590 Fatboy 8GB3. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark (1080p, 1440p, 4K)5. Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (1080p, 1440p, 4K)6. Far Cry 5 (1080p, 1440p, 4K)7. Ghost Recon: Wildlands (1080p, 1440p, 4K)8. Middle Earth: Shadow of War (1080p, 1440p, 4K)9. Shadow of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Clock Speed11. Temperatures12. Acoustics13. Power Consumption14. Overclocking: 3DMark and Games15. Overclocking: Thermals, Acoustics, Power16. Closing Thoughts17. View All Pages

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.

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