ASRock Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB Review

Name: ASRock Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB
Brand: ASRock

W1zzard

on May 22nd, 2018,

in Graphics Cards.

Manufacturer: ASRock

(41 Comments) »

Introduction

We have with us ASRock's very first graphics card, the Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB. When ASRock started operations in the early-2000s, no PC enthusiast took it seriously. It focused on low-cost motherboards made on entry-level chipsets, but over the years, earned a lot of brand equity by targeting the largest segment of the market first. As the company became more independent from ASUSTek, it started directly competing across all market segments and earned respect from PC enthusiasts for coming up with some of the boldest and strangest motherboard designs. The company has since matured into a solid motherboard brand that has products in every price-band.

ASRock's expansion into other product segments beyond motherboards has been rather conservative compared to the likes of ASUS and MSI. The company is looking to change that with the biggest entry since motherboards - graphics cards. Several industry observers commented that ASRock's decision to sell graphics cards has less to do with PC gaming and more to do with the breakneck growth of GPU-accelerated blockchain compute, particularly crypto-currency mining. ASRock didn't take the route of some other graphics card manufacturers that made mining-specific graphics cards (which lack even display connectors, are extremely basic, and often with close to no product warranties). The company doesn't want to appear greedy to PC gamers, and hence, its graphics cards are full-fledged. Its first sub-brand for graphics cards is called Phantom Gaming, with an emphasis on "gaming."

AMD is the launch partner for ASRock's Phantom Gaming series, with the lineup being entirely based on the company's Radeon RX 500-series "Polaris" GPUs. The card we have with us is the top-dog Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB. This card combines a PCB that is custom-design, although laid out similar to AMD's reference-design PCB. There's also Micron-made 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, and a cooling solution which many have commented looks identical to the ones found on some Colorful graphics cards (probably same OEM). This cooler is a proper aluminium fin-stack heatsink with copper heat pipes feeding heat to it.

The ASRock RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB is factory-overclocked to speeds of 1380 MHz out of the box, with two software-toggled presets either spooling it up to 1435 MHz (OC Mode) or bucking it down to 1324 MHz (Silent Mode). The card features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory across the RX 580's 256-bit wide memory interface. Pricing and availability is up in the air. You won't find it in Europe, and in the regions that you do, it's among the more affordable RX 580 cards. While official pricing isn't available yet, the card is expected to be one of the most affordable RX 580s on the market, so we picked a price of $290 for our comparisons (which is the price of the cheapest RX 580 on Newegg at this time).

Radeon RX 580 Market Segment Analysis
	Price	Shader Units	ROPs	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Memory Clock	GPU	Transistors	Memory
RX 470	$400	2048	32	932 MHz	1216 MHz	1650 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	4 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 570	$250	2048	32	1168 MHz	1244 MHz	1750 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	4 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 970	$300	1664	56	1051 MHz	1178 MHz	1750 MHz	GM204	5200M	4 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 480	$500	2304	32	1120 MHz	1266 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX 580	$290	2304	32	1257 MHz	1340 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
ASRock RX 580 Gaming X	$290	2304	32	1257 MHz	1380 MHz	2000 MHz	Ellesmere	5700M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
GTX 1060 3 GB	$230	1152	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	3 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 1060	$300	1280	48	1506 MHz	1708 MHz	2002 MHz	GP106	4400M	6 GB, GDDR5, 192-bit
GTX 980 Ti	$390	2816	96	1000 MHz	1075 MHz	1750 MHz	GM200	8000M	6 GB, GDDR5, 384-bit
R9 Fury X	$380	4096	64	1050 MHz	N/A	500 MHz	Fiji	8900M	4 GB, HBM, 4096-bit
GTX 1070	$470	1920	64	1506 MHz	1683 MHz	2002 MHz	GP104	7200M	8 GB, GDDR5, 256-bit
RX Vega 56	$600	3584	64	1156 MHz	1471 MHz	800 MHz	Vega 10	12500M	8 GB, HBM2, 2048-bit

Packaging and Contents

You will receive:

Graphics card
Documentation + driver disc

The Card

ASRock's card comes with a fairly clean look and straight edges. The plastic shroud has some metal applications as highlights. A backplate is not available. Dimensions of the card are 26.5 cm x 11.0 cm. Note how the back of the shroud is just plastic without function; you could cut that off to fit the card in a smaller case, thus saving about 2.5 cm.

Installation requires two slots in your system.

Display connectivity options include a DVI port, one HDMI port, and three DisplayPorts.

The HDMI port is version 2.0b, and DisplayPort supports 1.3 HBR3/1.4 HDR ready, which enables support for 4K @ 120 Hz and 5K @ 60 Hz, or 8K @ 60 Hz with two cables. GPU-accelerated encoding is now supported for H.264 at up to 4K30, and HEVC is supported at up to 4K60. Accelerated decoding is supported for HEVC at up to 4K60 Main-10, VP9 is supported at up to 4K, and H.264 works at up to 4K120.