Packaging and Closer Look
The XFX Radeon RX 580 GTS Black Edition comes with a simple but nice packaging. The box art is black and red themed, very AMD Radeon. XFX is still using that brown box to house the graphics card together with its accessories. The package includes an installation guide, a driver CD and a reading material. The reading material is simply saying that if you have an internet connection, don’t use the driver CD; instead download the latest drivers from the internet. Only use the driver CD if you don’t have an internet connection or you don’t have any other choice.
Above you can see the front, back and side views of the XFX RX 580 GTS Black Edition. By the way, it shares the same look and design with the RX 580 GTS XXX Edition and GTS Black Core. The GTR Editions have LED lighting and different shroud design. This card’s cooler shroud features a stairs-like / angled design with a faux carbon fiber finish. It has a nice and solid backplate that wraps around on the end portion of the card. The metal backplate doesn’t really prevent the RX 580 from sagging since it’s not that heavy and it’s not that long; instead it’s for aesthetics (and to protect the components on the back side of the PCB). It’s a good design and I like how the backplate looks. It’s very neutral looking with an XFX logo. I think every mid-range to high end graphics card must have a backplate.
The XFX RX 580 GTS Black Edition has an HDMI 2.0b port, three DisplayPorts 1.4, and a DVI-DL output port that is not present on the RX 580/480 reference version. I’ve taken two more angled shots to show you those “stairs-like” designs I mentioned above. I don’t know what the proper term for this kind of design is. You can also see the carbon-fiber effect, making it look nice even though the shroud is made out of hard plastic.
XFX is using two 100mm fans with 11 fan blades; the company calls it “SuperCell” fan. It also features Zero DB fan system, meaning the fans automatically adjust depending on the load of the GPU. When it’s idle to light load, the fans don’t spin at all; and it starts to spin once it reaches a certain point of temperature. This is a very common feature nowadays on graphics card, and it’s good to see XFX is implementing the same technology on their cards as well.
Above are more angled shots of the RX 580 GTX Black Edition from the back side. Notice that the 8-pin power connector is somewhat recessed. This is because the cooler shroud is wider and extends a little bit further to wrap the copper heatpipes. The XFX logo on the side doesn’t have any LED lighting illumination though. But I wish XFX placed some illumination; a simple white LED would be a nice touch.
Above you can see how the card’s cooler shroud looks like. It features a copper base plate with four copper heatpipes that transfers the heat from the copper base to the aluminum fin stacks. The aluminum fins are arranged on a horizontal manner, allowing the fans to blow the heat through the rear exhaust. This also prevents the hot air from being exhausted directly to the motherboard. Some hot air may escape sideways since it’s an open air cooler design after all; but at least the surface of the motherboard won’t suffer the full blow of the heat, especially if you have an M.2 SSD installed underneath the graphics card.
Removing the front cooler shroud also reveals that the back plate (together with the cooler shroud) extends further. They are both a little bit wider and longer; making the whole graphics card longer than it should be. All the memory and the VRMs are passively cooled by the aluminum heat sink with the help of thermal pads.
At the heart of XFX’s RX 580 GTS Black Edition is the 14nm Ellesmere GPU die using Polaris architecture. This is the same GPU used on the RX 480 last year. However, if I am not mistaken these new Ellesemere GPUs are refined and are made by Samsung or Globalfoundries. There are 8x GDDR5 memory chips by Samsung; rated to run at 2000MHz to 2025MHz (OC+).
XFX is also using an NCP81022 Series Linear Voltage Regulator Controller by ON Semiconductor. It’s a dual output 4 phase plus 1 phase digital controller with SVI2 interface used commonly on AMD’s products.
Now it’s time to see what this graphics card can do. Before we take a look at the benchmark results; let’s check out first our test system, the XFX RX 580 GTS BE’s temperature, noise level, and its overclocking potential on the next page.
