The Card

The XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy probably earned its name from being shorter in length than most cards in its class, while being taller and thicker. It uses a dual-fan cooling solution. A pair of 80 mm fans guide air through an aluminium fin-stack heatsink. The cooler is longer than the PCB underneath it. The backplate extends into the tail-end. Dimensions of the card are 27.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include three DisplayPort 1.4, a HDMI 2.0b, and a dual-link DVI-D. The DVI connector has no analog wiring, so D-Sub dongles won't work and an active adapter has to be used.


The board uses a combination of 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 300 watts of power draw.


XFX includes a dual-BIOS feature with their card, which will come in handy when it comes to recovering from a failed BIOS flash. Both BIOSes are identical.


The Radeon RX 590, like every other current AMD GPU, supports up to 4-way CrossFire X via PCIe.

Disassembly

Taking the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy apart is straightforward because there are no exotic screws in your way. The cooler features an aluminium fin-stack heatsink with fins arranged such that air is guided along the front and back, rather than the sides. A copper base conducts heat from the GPU to four 6 mm thick copper heat pipes, which distribute heat across the fin stack. A secondary aluminium base pulls heat from the memory chips. Additional aluminium bases attached to the fin stack draw heat from the VRM MOSFETs.


As we mentioned earlier, the metal backplate extends into the rear-end of the card. There's an insulating sheath, although with no thermal pad to pull some heat from behind the GPU, which is a waste of so much metal.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.