AMD RX 480 review: The best budget graphics card—but for how long?

Specs at a glance: AMD RX 480
COMPUTE UNITS	36
TEXTURE UNITS	144
ROPS	32
CORE CLOCK	1120MHz
BOOST CLOCK	1266MHz
MEMORY BUS WIDTH	256-bit
MEMORY SPEED	8GHz or 7GHz
MEMORY BANDWIDTH	320GB/s or 224GB/s
MEMORY SIZE	8GB GDDR5 or 4GB GDDR5
Outputs	3x DisplayPort 1.3, 1x HDMI 2.0b with support for 4K60 HDR
Release date	June 29
PRICE	8GB (as reviewed): £215, $230. 4GB: £180, $200

Brave? Foolhardy? Desperate? Whatever you might think about AMD's decision to cede the top end of the graphics card market (at least for now) to Nvidia and launch the mainstream-focused RX 480 instead, the fact remains that for £180/$200 it's the best graphics card you can buy. It's faster than Nvidia's GTX 970, and (mostly) faster than an R9 390, making it more than powerful enough to meet the minimum spec for virtual reality—and it'll blitz through demanding 1080p games at a smooth 60FPS too. It even does a decent job at 1440p, so long as you're fine with dialling down a few settings.

As a consumer product, then, the RX 480 is a success, even if one of AMD's core pitches—that it'll help drive VR adoption—is a little suspect. VR headsets still cost well over £500, after all.

But—and sadly, there always seems to be but with AMD—the RX 480 is not a great debut for Polaris 10, its first GPU based on an all-new, theoretically-more-efficient 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. At 150W, the RX 480 sits in the same power envelope as the GTX 1070, yet offers less performance. It runs hotter too, hitting 80 degrees Celsius, even struggling to hit its advertised boost clock at times—and that's in a big, well ventilated case. Compared to AMD's previous cards, it's an improvement, but those were always power-hungry beasts, and the bar has since been raised.

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