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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.
