Today's review covers the Gigabyte AORUS RX 580 XTR, which is the company's highest-clocked Radeon RX 580 variant. The RX 580 is basically a rebrand of the RX 480 with the same Ellesmere GPU, just made on a better process (still 14 nm), which allows higher clock frequencies. Gigabyte's card comes overclocked to 1460 MHz out of the box - a frequency that wouldn't be possible on the RX 480 version of Ellesmere. Thanks to that overclock out of the box, the card can beat NVIDIA's GTX 1060 6 GB with a 6% margin. The slower GTX 1060 3 GB is 15% behind, AMD's aging R9 Fury X is 10% faster, and the GTX 1070 is 25% ahead. This makes the RX 580 a great card for 1080p gaming, which can also handle some 1440p if you are willing to sacrifice details. It would have been nice to see some overclocking on the memory, too, which would have provided additional benefits to cover against the upcoming GTX 1060 with faster 9 Gbps memory.

Gigabyte's thermal solution uses four heatpipes that make direct contact with the GPU core. It also cools voltage regulation circuitry and memory chips. Overall, this cooler seems like a decent solution that can handle the heat well, reaching temperatures of 74°C under load, which is in line with what we've seen on other RX 580 cards. Noise levels are decent with 34 dBA, but not anywhere close to how quiet the best GTX 1060 cards are. Also included is the idle-fan-off feature we love so much since it provides a perfect noise-free experience during desktop work, Internet browsing, and even light gaming. A high-quality backplate and controllable RGB lighting round off the cooling configuration.

AMD managed to improve power draw of the RX 580 in non-gaming states, but the AORUS RX 580 doesn't show much of that, rather being closer to the RX 480 in those states. Gaming power draw is really high; at 227W, it is 60 W higher than the GTX 1080, which is much faster at the same time, of course. To me, it looks like AMD's GPU fabrication process improvements only help with achieving higher clocks, with no reduction in power consumption. Looking at performance-per-watt numbers, the RX 580 has dropped back to R9 Fury X levels, which makes NVIDIA's GPU more than twice as energy efficient.

Right now, it's almost impossible to find a Radeon 400 or 500 Series graphics card at acceptable pricing, if you can even find any in stock. The reason for that is the GPU cryptocurrency mining craze, and miners are buying up everything they can. AMD misplanned their GPU chip production, so they can't supply new chips to the board partners, which means the board partners can't make any boards to sell, which drives up prices due to the laws of supply and demand. Throughout the review, I used a price of $270, which is a realistic price point for the AORUS RX 580 XTR; a price point that's reasonable, maybe $10 or $15 on the high side. At this time, supply of the NVIDIA GTX 1060 series cards seems to be doing ok, so that'll probably be the card to buy at the moment due to a lack of choice. I rather recommend you wait a bit with your buying decision until things improve later this year.