ASRock Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX580 8G OC Review: A Solid Rookie Effort | Tom's Hardware

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As long as ASRock sets the price correctly, the card can set a new standard for performance per dollar. The company obviously saved a lot of costs; now, it needs to pass on the savings to customers. The performance can meet our expectations, you will get a lot of display output, the dual-slot form factor is very suitable in most cases, and most PSUs do not need an eight-pin power connector. Of course, ASRock could have used a stronger radiator to reduce the pressure on the fan and make it spin so fast. But for now, Phantom Gaming X did not give us a reason to recommend the more expensive Radeon RX 580, which is a compliment.

AMD's Radeon RX 580 is old news at this point. But in a sense, this makes it an ideal business card for ASRock's debut as a graphics company. The platform is stable. The competition is established. And the stakes are relatively low. If you are not familiar with this Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX580 8G OC core GPU, please check our

. Or let us go back in time

, When the Ellesmere GPU was launched. Today’s presentation will draw on the valuable experience of the past two years and apply it to mainstream cards. The design of the card clearly considers cost savings.

The performance of the Radeon RX 580 is well known, so the success of the card depends on its relatively small cooling solution, whether the lack of a backplane and lack of eye-catching LEDs can push the price down enough to weaken the 580s. Since we came into contact with Phantom Gaming X before it landed on store shelves, we can only guess that ASRock wants to be on par with Sapphire’s Nitro+, Gigabyte’s Gaming 8G and PowerColor’s Red Dragon, the latter being the cheapest Radeon RX 580s . Unfortunately, American readers may have to wait for a while to discover: ASRock only sells products to South America and APEC countries.

The weight of only 598g tells us that ASRock provides a conservative cooling solution to cool AMD's Ellesmere GPU. Nevertheless, the distance from the slot bracket to the end of the fan shroud is 26.7 cm, which is a fairly long graphics card. The height of 10.5 cm and the width of 3.5 cm keep ASRock’s Phantom Gaming X within the true dual slot size.

Two 8.5 cm fans are located at the 8.7 cm opening. A total of 9 rotor blades are optimized for each fan to allow air to flow through the radiator, so they generate more static pressure than fans designed for turbulence.

ASRock saves some costs by not using a backplane. We think this is a wise decision. It doesn't do much for cooling, nor does it need to be stable, because the heat dissipation solution is very light.

Looking up from the bottom, we can see that ASRock uses a horizontal heat sink. This is our preference because it allows some hot air to escape from the slot holder. The alternative is to rotate the fins to face vertically, pushing the hot air down towards the motherboard and against the side of the chassis.

The eight-pin auxiliary power connector visible from the top is rotated 180 degrees to make it easier to handle. On higher-priced models, you might want ASRock’s logo to have LED backlighting. But this is not the case with Phantom Gaming X, and we are satisfied with it.

The open back allows warm air to drain into your box. Moreover, using a shorter PCB means that ASRock's heat sink slightly exceeds the height of the board.

The slot holder has five familiar outputs. In addition to a single DVI connector, you also get an HDMI 2.0 port (especially suitable for VR HMD) and three DisplayPort 1.4 ready interfaces. The ventilation holes on the board allow some hot air to pass through the horizontal heat sink and out of the chassis.

The following screenshot from GPU-Z conveys the maximum clock rate of the card. In fact, the power and temperature limitations of Phantom Gaming X mean that these frequencies are generally not sustainable.

We introduced our new test system and method

. If you want to know more about our general approach, please check it out. Since then, we have upgraded the CPU and cooling system to ensure that nothing will be as fast as this graphics card.

The hardware used in our laboratory includes:

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