ASRock Phantom Gaming X RX 580 Review

1. Introduction2. Phantom Gaming X RX 5803. Testing Methodology4. 3DMark5. 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. Rise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 1440p, 4K)10. Temperatures11. Acoustics12. Power Consumption (Introducing Powenetics)13. Overclocking14. Closing Thoughts15. View All Pages

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.

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