ASRock's Radeon RX 590 Phantom Gaming is based on AMD's latest version of the "Polaris" GPU, built on a 12 nanometer production process at GlobalFoundries. The shift to the smaller node brings with it improvements in power consumption and maximum clock frequency. Besides the production process, everything is identical on the RX 590. The number of shaders, ROPs, texture units, etc., is identical to what we saw with the Radeon RX 480. Software features are also unchanged, but at this time, there is no pressing need to address these. It seems AMD simply leveraged the new 12 nanometer process to reach higher clock speeds on their RX 590 with the minimum in time and money invested, which actually makes sense.

Compared to the Radeon RX 580, the ASRock RX 590 is 11% faster at 1080p when averaged over our whole benchmark suite. Compared to NVIDIA's latest card, the GTX 1660 Ti, the RX 590 is 23% behind, AMD's Radeon RX Vega 56 is 30% faster. The additional 10% in extra gaming performance over the RX 580 will come in handy when it comes to driving the latest titles at 1080p. Compared to what was needed two years ago, games do have (a bit) higher hardware requirements these days. We'd recommend the RX 590 for all titles at the highest detail settings in 1080p.

Unlike other RX 590 models we tested previously, the ASRock card actually improves power efficiency over the Radeon RX 580. Seems that other vendors pushed the voltages on their RX 590 higher than necessary, probably to improve yields. Still, with around 200 W during gaming, power consumption is not even close to what NVIDIA can offer with their Turing cards, especially the GTX 1660 Ti is impressive, using just 130 W while delivering over 20% more FPS than the RX 590. What's also a bit sad to see is that AMD still hasn't worked on reducing multi-monitor power consumption, an issue that has been around for many years.

ASRock's dual-slot cooler is a highly cost effective design that cools all heat-generating circuitry using just a single cooling component. Temperatures are fine with 74°C when loaded, but noise levels are little bit high even compared to other RX 590 cards. Looking at NVIDIA's offerings, the differences are even bigger, especially custom-design GTX 1060 and GTX 1660 Ti cards can be very quiet. It's great to see that ASRock has included the idle-fan-off feature with their card, which turns off the fans completely when the card isn't used for gaming and lets you enjoy silence during desktop work and Internet browsing—many GTX 1660 Ti cards lack that feature.

With a price of $249, the ASRock RX 590 Phantom Gaming is the most affordable RX 590 card on the market at this time. While pricing is not unreasonable, it still feels a bit high, especially when comparing with the GTX 1660 Ti. NVIDIA's latest release offers significantly more performance (at higher cost, though). However, the GTX 1660 Ti is available at $279, which is a 12% increase in price over the ASRock RX 590, and the GTX 1660 Ti offers 23% higher performance, which results in a better price/performance ratio. With the RX 590, AMD is including three AAA games: Devil May Cry 5, Resident Evil 2, and The Division 2, which are all great titles that will keep you busy for a long time. So, if you're interested in those games, you can significantly offset the cost of the RX 590. NVIDIA doesn't include a game bundle with the GTX 1660 Ti. More competition for the RX 590 is on the horizon in form of NVIDIA's GTX 1660 non-Ti, which, according to rumors, releases this month at similar pricing as the RX 590. I wouldn't be surprised if we see substantial price drops for the RX 590 very soon, to ensure competitiveness with NVIDIA's offerings.