I guess everybody was surprised when MSI made the announcement a few weeks ago that they'll release a new Radeon RX 580 card—a product that's been on the market for over a year... two years if you count the RX 480 (which the RX 580 is a rebrand of). My guess is that with dwindling demand from miners, MSI found themselves with a bunch of cards left in storage, which they turned into this new gaming SKU.

The Radeon RX 580 Mech 2 comes with a small 40 MHz overclock out of the box, up to 1380 MHz, which results in a 2% performance improvement at 1080p, similar to what NVIDIA's GTX 1060 6 GB offers. AMD's next-fastest card is the RX Vega 56, which is 34% faster, but more expensive. NVIDIA's GTX 1060 3 GB is 13% slower, and the GTX 1070 is 29% faster. These levels of performance make the RX 580 a good choice for gaming at 1080p with high details. It would have been nice if MSI had overclocked the memory, too. The chips can certainly take it as our manual overclocking shows.

MSI's cards have always had good coolers and the Mech 2 is no exception. Thanks to a solid heatpipe design, this dual-slot variant delivers good noise levels and temperatures. With just 32 dBA, the card matches the quietest RX 580 cards we tested so far, resulting in noise levels comparable to typical GTX 1060 cards. Highly optimized custom designs of the GTX 1060 are much quieter though. 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.

Overclocking potential on our sample was phenomenal, which could just be luck of the draw or a trend for more recently produced chips. Our chip is marked as being produced in week 17 of 2018, which is significantly newer than any other RX 580 GPU we tested so far. I guess only time (and more results) can tell whether this trend is real or just due to a lucky sample.

Gaming power consumption of the MSI Radeon RX 580 Mech 2 is good at around 15 W less than even the reference design, and much lower than competing custom-design variants. This is one of the cornerstones around which MSI achieved such low temperatures and noise levels without having to go for a bulky (and expensive) triple-slot cooler. Furmark maximum power exceeds the 225 W power delivery specification of the 8-pin power input by 33 W, but that's a non-issue in my opinion as any decent PSU should be able to handle that.

According to MSI, the card's pricing is set to "$350 to $370", which seems pretty high given that with the mining craze over you can now find the RX 580 for around $260. The GeForce GTX 1060 at $280 is another strong competitor to the Mech 2. When confronted with that, MSI responded that the quoted pricing is just for reference and that the final price will be adjusted to reflect market conditions. I'd say a reasonable price for the RX 580 Mech 2 is around $275 to $285, which would make the MSI RX 580 Mech 2 a top choice for gamers looking for a Radeon RX 580 card.