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  • goatfajitas - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    That's it... The same thing with 10% higher clocks? Ouch
  • ddriver - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    No, it also has higher TDP ;)
  • ImSpartacus - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    My space heater broke, so this is perfect.
  • goatfajitas - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    LOL... Well in that case, let me find my cc. I'll take two
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Not worth going to a new generational name, but worth coming out with the products. Perhaps they could have added a suffix or just let their board partners introduce new cards with higher clocks but the same name. It's also nice to see they've abandoned the seemingly faux TDP claims of the 400 series.
  • ddriver - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    They should have launched at 199$ though. From a gamer perspective there is zero incentive to get a 580 rather than a 1060. Even though performance is comparable, the latter is way more power efficient.
  • Vishnu NS - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    There's atleast one reason for a gamer : FreeSync & the cheap high quality 144 Hz Freesync monitors for gaming.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    And better DX12 performance.
  • Yojimbo - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Yeah, I don't think the 580 is a very good deal at that price unless you are looking specifically to play the games that the 580 excels at or if you already have a FreeSync monitor.

    I don't buy into any DX12 performance argument. I think that AotS is probably the only truly DX12 game out there (I could be wrong, but that's my impression). It's an AMD partner game and the 580 and 1060 are still pretty much even in that game. To me there is no reason to believe the "AMD hardware will be better at DX12 games" claim. When developers are experienced with DX12 and games are truly designed and optimized for DX12 from the ground up then we will see how hardware actually performs in DX12.

    As far as the power savings from the NVIDIA card, yeah, it will probably save something like 10 or 15 dollars over the life of the card, but people don't really think about that because it's accumulated slowly over time. They don't actually notice it happening.
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Re DX12 -- yeah you're right. The initial DX12 stuff performed well on the island cards and that's stuck in my head, but yes there's no such AMD-Nvidia DX12 gap on the 14 nm cards. My bad.
  • gruffi - Saturday, April 22, 2017 - link

    All the people i hear say that GTX 1060 became useless. RX 480/580 is simply the better product. Period. There is more than power efficiency. Performance, Performance/price, features, DX12/Vulkan, Freesync, compute performance, etc. Everything wins the Radeon. Even AMD's software stack / drivers is better nowadays. And they finally fixed the power consumption for video playback. Only clueless people or Nvidiots would still buy a GTX 1060.
  • boozed - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    This also strikes me as a "+5" update, not a "+100".
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    They could have easily named the RX485, 475 etc. with a good match performance-wise. Marketing will be afraid of worse sales due to not offering a "new generation", though. Not convinced they're right.. but I'm sure they've got better numbers than my gut.
  • tarqsharq - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    They even published a slide with their intended naming scheme which should have made this product RX485, RX475, RX465 and RX450 (since there was no RX450 yet).

    It would have been a decent difference while not being as confusing as the Titan X, XP and now Xp on the Nvidia side of the fence.
  • BloodyBunnySlippers - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    I'm sorry, but what is TBP? Google is failing me and I simply don't know what it means. Thermal "Besigned" Power?
  • BloodyBunnySlippers - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Nevermind... Typical Board Power. Sorry. Should have read more. I'll go to the corner and think about what I've done.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    The sad thing is that the 550 is the most interesting card in the launch. Despite being severely limited by diminishing returns die size scaling, by replacing the ancient GCN1 cards it actually should offer a larger performance upgrade than the others. And by pushing GCN1 off the bottom of the stack it will let AMD start moving towards when they can deprecate the architecture and stop having to do extra work to support it in drivers.
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Yeah, the 550 is the only GPU worth notice in this release. In my opinion, it's the only GPU I'd even consider purchasing since Polaris and Pascal were announced. The 50W TDP opens the door to -maybe- half height, single slot cards. It also fills in the performance gap left open between commonly available iGPUs (since Intel still isn't pushing out many eDRAM enabled SKUs) and the current bottom end of dedicated cards.
  • ImSpartacus - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Isn't GP107 already in half height?

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/11016/gigabyte-launc...

    I feel like pascal is where it's at of your looking for efficiency at all cost.
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    That's half height dual slot. Broken Crayons wants something sufficiently low power to be half height single slot. For standard consumer designs that's typically 30-40W; 50W is probably doable with a bigger fan and or a lower board power design (and a bit more throttling).
  • BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Yup, that's pretty much what I'd like to see in the current generation. Although I've given up on desktop gaming for the moment, if I were to dabble in it again, I'd do it with a retired half height business box like an Optiplex or something that'll fit under a modest monitor stand. For that to work, I need the lowest possible TDP. A GT 730 did the job a year or two ago, but it wasn't quite enough GPU even then so I had hopes that there'd be something to fill that need in Pascal and Polaris. So far the only options are the lowest end Pascal-based Quadros which don't really offer a good value proposition. The RX 550 gets closer, but like you've already said, 50W might still be a bit of a stretch for such a small cooler.
  • phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Yeah, I'm still waiting for something newer than a GT730 for 3-monitor setups at work. Our standard desktop case only supports half-height cards. Single-slot isn't required for our uses, but half-height most definitely is. Fanless would be best, but a quiet-enough fan would be acceptable.

    Will be interesting to see if the 1050 or 550 can be made to work in this setup.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    heck the 7750 managed it without throttling, and it puled 60 watt.
  • ET - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    All we need is for OEM's to want to address this market slot. It can be done even with an RX 460, and probably even better with a 560. There's just need to tweak the voltage and clock rate, and these cards can reach sub-40W with decent performance. I actually find the 60-80W of the 560 quite promising, especially considering the full 16 CU's.

    I find the 550's 50W somewhat disappointing, by comparison, but I guess that could also be easily tweaked down.
  • lmcd - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    What type of cases are you looking for that require half-height? There are a lot of very nice, quite small ITX cases that can handle dual-slot full-height.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    Old School mini-ITX. Before Mobo's got dense enough that mITX didn't involve serious performance compromises, it was all about building the smallest functional computer you could. While part of that market's migrated to things like a NUC the remainder is still around because the NUC is still a compromise too far for them. For people int that group, half height cards and a low profile CPU cooler let them roughly halve the volume over a conventional case layout with support for full height cards.
  • anakha64 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Unfortunately GCN1 isn't quite dead yet. AMD have Radeon 520 and 530 models (no RX) on their website. 520 is described as '1st Gen GCN Architecture' and 530 as '3rd Gen'.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    The 530 has me really wondering because Wikipedia doesn't list any small 3rd gen GPU:. Did AMD make a smaller GPU using 3rd gen cores for the 5xx generation? Was it designed a few years ago but never launched? Are these bottom of the barrel binning rejects of a large die that they're just trying to use up.
  • TallestJon96 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    The 560 is actually not too bad. Something like 2.6 teraflops with 4gb VRAM for $99. Thats much better than the 460 with ~2.2 teraflops and either 2gb (never buy 2gb) for $110 or 4gb for $130-$140. Compared to a $130 4gb 460, the $99 4gb 560 is about 55% better value for the money.

    The 460 4gb never made sense with the much better 470 4gb only costing $30-$40 more.

    For anyone on a tight budget, an R5 1400 and either 560 or 570 is a great deal for good performance.
  • ET - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    The 460 4GB made sense for an HTPC, but unfortunately the only low profile 4GB card isn't really available to buy, so I made do with a 2GB version.
  • madwolfa - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    More like "Polaris Rehashed", amirite?
  • sutamatamasu - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Sadly, when rumor blow up many website say with slide this GPU using 3rd Gen 14nm FinFET aka 14nm LPC, i think this card will be bit better on efficiency, but when final release it's using same 14nm LPP.
  • IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    There's no way a refresh can come with a different process. If you hear those sorts of rumors next time, disregard themy because they don't have a clue.
  • kaesden - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    I thought this was supposed to give the gtx 1080 a run for its money? Or at least compete with the 1070...
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Your thinking of Vega
  • Flunk - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Which was promised first quarter 2017, and has yet to arrive.
  • Drumsticks - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    Pretty sure Vega was never officially promised for Q1. I'm pretty sure AMD has always officially stated H1, when they've given it a schedule.
  • kn00tcn - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    vega was NEVER promised in the first quarter, amd has always said may/Q2/first half of year, the rumors say the same

    you want them to attempt to launch ryzen5, refresh polaris, & vega all at the same time? that will be quite the stress/logistics induced trainwreck
  • Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Yes, it was H1 (and we always knew it would be the end not the beginning), and now Q2. It's going to be May, probably late May.
  • imronburgundy - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    At this point, I think Vega is really just an inside joke at AMD.
  • Meteor2 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    I just want to give the 550 a cuddle
  • Der Keyser - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    I'm missing a bit of information:

    I'm a photographer and are solely looking for a GPU that will drive 3x 4K displays fast and fluently in desktop mode - no need for gaming. I have a mini-ITx machine so as little noise as possible is preferred. Will a RX550 suffice for that?

    I cannot se how many displays - and which interfaces - the GPU's support. I would prefer 3 x DIsplayport, but HDMI 2.0 will suffice - DVI-D will not drive 4K properly.

    Will both the rx560 and rx550 support zero fan speed idle for normal desktop mode (no 3D accelerated workloads)?

    Or should I just upgrade my machine to a Kaby Lake or the upcoming Coffe lake CPU and use the iGPU for my needs? Not sure 3 x Displayport is possible with Kaby Lake - maybe with Coffe Lake?
  • kn00tcn - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    but the cpus arent 'zero fan speed', so why do you need such a feature? a large enough slow enough fan is quite close to silent

    you'll have to read the product pages of every brand's card & model if you insist on zero fan (if it cant be stopped in software), fan speeds have nothing to do with the gpu maker
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    The concern you should have right now is that any low profile cards are unlikely to include 3 ports, especially as vendors have dropped mDP from consumer cards. Full profile cards will, but for legacy reasons you can count on one of those being a DVI port, so we're back to square one. In fact of all the cards I've seen so far, all of them seem to be using the same AMD PCB with 1x DP, 1x HDMI, 1x DVI.

    As for zero fan speed idle, that will be up to the specific card vendor. There's no way to know now.
  • Der Keyser - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Yeah, that's the problem. My mini-ITX machine will not hold a full lenght dual-slot GPU which. Currently is needed for for a GPU with 3x displayport and zero fan speed idle.

    Really strange the no vendor has made a specialized card to cater for this niche. I can't be the only non-gamer wanting to go 3 x 4K display.

    the R9 Nano card seems interesting, but I cant figure if it will go zero fan speed idle.
  • Mugur - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    I use 2 x 1440p Dells at work from my notebook with a single DP output (daisy-chained). I think this is a feature since DP 1.2. So a cable from notebook to 1st monitor and another cable from monitor 1 to monitor 2.
  • Der Keyser - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Should mention my machine will take a dual-slot card, it's only the length thats very restricted.

    And the R9 nano card is pretty expensive considering I don't need all that GPU power
  • Der Keyser - Sunday, April 23, 2017 - link

    Jeezz, don't know why i didn't think of the workstation cards. They are just what I need.
    A nvidia quadro P600 does exactly what I want with 4 x displayport and single slot setup.
    And it's less than 200$ :-)
  • Simon42 - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link

    I have an RX 460 plugged into a single 4k TV inside a Silverstone FT03 mini itx case. It's at 100% as soon as I use Chrome or SolidWorks intensively, so it gets over its 60° silent fan limit often... The memory improvements on RX 560 are interesting to me, but I think 4k is a good workout for the whole computer so running multiple monitors might be a challenge without better hardware (I'm running a 3570K Ivy Bridge).
  • xMiracle45 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link

    What a Joke its clock boosted 400 series. Meanwhile over at Nvidia they are eating up the market with the 10 series. Should have Launched Vega in the first quarter. Not sure why AMD has fallen so far off the competitive market with their graphics cards the 7870's use to be the go-to.
  • sfranta - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Polaris 12 (RX 550) should be native 64-bit bus to bring much needed effectivity, die size and low power.
  • milli - Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - link

    Page 2: If it’s anything like Oland, Polaris 12 will have other features stripped out (e.g. Oland didn’t have a video decoder), but we don’t have any further details on Polaris 12 at this time.

    I think you mean video encoder.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link

    No, I mean a video decoder. Oland was meant to be paired with AMD's APUs; it was deemed that it didn't need a video decoder when the CPU/APU already had one.

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