Introduction

In November last year, AMD announced its Radeon RX 590 graphics card, which was an unexpected surprise at the time. It is based on the "Polaris 30" silicon, which is essentially a "Polaris 10" die built on the latest 12 nm FinFET node at GlobalFoundries, yielding significant energy-efficiency dividends AMD is cashing in on to increase clock speeds by 15 percent. The engine clock has been dialed up to 1545 MHz compared to the 1340 MHz of the RX 580.

Unlike the RX 580, the RX 590 only comes with 8 GB of video memory (no 4 GB variant), and the card's memory setup is unchanged: 8 Gbps GDDR5 over a 256-bit wide memory interface, which yields 256 GB/s of bandwidth. The "Polaris 30" silicon features the same core configuration as its predecessors with 2,304 stream processors spread across 36 compute units, 144 TMUs, and 32 ROPs. There's no ray-tracing machinery to rival RTX, or other new features.



In this review, we're taking a look at the ASRock Radeon RX 590 Phantom Gaming X, which is is a highly cost-optimized variant of the RX 590 that still comes with a factory overclock to 1560 MHz Boost, which is comparable to other RX 590 cards on the market. The card draws power from a single 8-pin PCIe power connector.

Priced at $250, the ASRock RX 590 Phantom Gaming X is the most affordable RX 590 on the market at this time.