Introduction

We have with us ASRock's very first graphics card, the Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB. When ASRock started operations in the early-2000s, no PC enthusiast took it seriously. It focused on low-cost motherboards made on entry-level chipsets, but over the years, earned a lot of brand equity by targeting the largest segment of the market first. As the company became more independent from ASUSTek, it started directly competing across all market segments and earned respect from PC enthusiasts for coming up with some of the boldest and strangest motherboard designs. The company has since matured into a solid motherboard brand that has products in every price-band.

ASRock's expansion into other product segments beyond motherboards has been rather conservative compared to the likes of ASUS and MSI. The company is looking to change that with the biggest entry since motherboards - graphics cards. Several industry observers commented that ASRock's decision to sell graphics cards has less to do with PC gaming and more to do with the breakneck growth of GPU-accelerated blockchain compute, particularly crypto-currency mining. ASRock didn't take the route of some other graphics card manufacturers that made mining-specific graphics cards (which lack even display connectors, are extremely basic, and often with close to no product warranties). The company doesn't want to appear greedy to PC gamers, and hence, its graphics cards are full-fledged. Its first sub-brand for graphics cards is called Phantom Gaming, with an emphasis on "gaming."



AMD is the launch partner for ASRock's Phantom Gaming series, with the lineup being entirely based on the company's Radeon RX 500-series "Polaris" GPUs. The card we have with us is the top-dog Radeon RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB. This card combines a PCB that is custom-design, although laid out similar to AMD's reference-design PCB. There's also Micron-made 8 Gbps GDDR5 memory, and a cooling solution which many have commented looks identical to the ones found on some Colorful graphics cards (probably same OEM). This cooler is a proper aluminium fin-stack heatsink with copper heat pipes feeding heat to it.

The ASRock RX 580 Phantom Gaming X 8 GB is factory-overclocked to speeds of 1380 MHz out of the box, with two software-toggled presets either spooling it up to 1435 MHz (OC Mode) or bucking it down to 1324 MHz (Silent Mode). The card features 8 GB of GDDR5 memory across the RX 580's 256-bit wide memory interface. Pricing and availability is up in the air. You won't find it in Europe, and in the regions that you do, it's among the more affordable RX 580 cards. While official pricing isn't available yet, the card is expected to be one of the most affordable RX 580s on the market, so we picked a price of $290 for our comparisons (which is the price of the cheapest RX 580 on Newegg at this time).