Tick Tock, no I'm not referring to a song by Kesha but instead I'm talking about the pattern that AMD seems to be following with their GPU lineup ever since the R9 200 series which was followed up by the R9 300 cards before dropping in the Polaris. A similar trend is what we are here to witness and review today, we have with us the Asus ROG STRIX RX 570 Gaming OC Graphics Card for review today all thanks to Asus India.
The RX 570 happens to be the refresh version of the RX 470 before AMD drops in their much anticipated Vega for gamers later this year. Its all in all the same 14nm Ellesmere GPU based card when it comes to bare hardware but to put it simply is overclocked with a higher TDP and interestingly is claimed by AMD to be more power efficient than its predecessor thanks to some minor tweaks on the software front.
Priced for around $185 it is clocked in at 1300Mhz on the clock and 1750Mhz on the memory the Asus STRIX RX 570 OC is 50Mhz and 100Mhz higher respectively from its Asus RX 470 OC counterpart. It is also much bigger in size obviously to accommodate a bigger cooling solution to keep this 150W TDP card under the danger mark. Rest it is the same 14nm Polaris architecture with 256-bit bus width and 32 ROPs.
What's in the Box?
Following the same packing style as the previous generation the Asus ROG STRIX RX 570 even comes in a black box with a multi-color STRIX marking on one side and the Radeon RX 570 4GB GDDR5 on the other.
At the back peculiar features such as Fan Connect, Asus AURA and DirectCU II cooler type are neatly printed with brief descriptions.
Open the box and you'll find the accessories lying beneath the molded foam containing the card. The bundled accessories include, driver CD, Asus ROG cable ties, a quick setup guide and Asus color stickers for the card itself.
Take a Closer Look
At the first glimpse itself you will realize that the STRIX RX 570 is exactly identical to the STRIX RX 470 with the main difference coming in that of physical size which is slimmer than its predecessor by a few millimeters. Other than that its similar to the very bits.
Measuring in at around 24cm its an all black card with minute detailing all over. The shroud of this dual slot card is made up of plastic and in terms of design is probably inspired from the U.S. Boeing–Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche combat helicopter!
At the back we can see the bare PCB with no backplate but another support system is provided to which we'll come to later on in the review. The card measures in at 24.2cm x 12.9cm x 3.9cm so you can fit this thing in almost any chassis in the market today.
The card is fed by a 8-pin power connector which gives it a peak 225W power limit on paper. Compared to the RX 470 this is more which can be attributed to the fact that its significantly overclocked out of the box for which it needs extra power for stability & theoretically provides more room for further OC which I'll be testing in the benchmark section.
The DirectCU II cooler employed by Asus for the ROG RX 570 is a pair of 100mm fans that don't spin till the card reaches 54°C. These fans are flat and edgy which give them a turbine like look complimenting the whole stealthy look of the card.
Looking at the connectivity options we see that its a dual slot card with two DVI ports, one HDMI port, and one DisplayPort. The HDMI port is 2.0b and the Display Ports are 1.3 HBR3/1.4 HDR ready.
A carry forward feature over here is the inclusion of a four pin PWM fan connector which enables you to connect a case fan to the card. This in turn synchronizes the fan spin with that of the card's delivering not only quieter but also more efficient cooling experience as a whole. This feature is helpful if you connect the bottom mounted case fan since it will start spinning whenever required by the card aiding its cooling with cool air from outside.
As the card lacks a backplate so Asus has put in a thin support strip that connects directly to the I/O panel and runs through the entire length of the card on the upper corner! This provides a similar support as a backplate, to the card and prevents it from wrapping under its own weight.
This is a cost effective solution and helps to bring down the overall price.
As much as I would love to discuss the insides of this card, its practically the same as that of the Asus ROG STRIX RX 470 OC so you can read the full review here if you like.
Time for some Benchmarks and Overclocking
Installing the Asus STRIX RX 570 OC was easy and it powered up like a breeze once we booted up the system.
GPUZ reported the correct frequencies with 1300Mhz on the clock and 1750Mhz on the memory.
For benchmarking the graphics card out test bench was as follows -
CPU: Intel Core i7 7700K @4.8Ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z270X Designare
RAM: Kingston HyperX Predator 8GB DDR4 3000Mhz
Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid Pro 280
Graphics Card: Asus ROG STRIX RX 570 OC
Storage: Corsair Neutron GTX 480 480GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 700
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
GPU Driver : Crimson ReLive Edition 17.6.2
Overclocking the STRIX RX 570 was a simple process and using the Asus GPU Tweak II or any other utility yielded the same results. The highest frequency with respect to performance gains that we could obtain on our sample was 1450Mhz on the clock and 2000Mhz on the memory, anything above this either gave poor results, white dots or even system freeze. Overclocking is dependent largely upon your sample so your results would largely depend upon your card.
This frequency is 7.4% higher on the clock and 16.27% higher on the memory to that of the Asus STRIX RX 470 which managed only a 1350Mhz on the clock and 1720Mhz on the memory. This is largely due to the fact that the RX 570 comes with a 8-pin power connector which gives it more headroom for overclocking!
Also please note that you cannot control the fan speed or overclock the card using any other utility if Asus GPU Tweak II is running so make sure you take care of this.
For the benchmarking we'll be using the gaming mode aswell as the OC mode since one can obtain that through one simple click along with the the results that we obtained at manual overclocked frequencies.
AIDA64 Extreme Edition GPGPU
The AIDA64 GPGPU test not only calculates the read, write and copy speed of the graphics card and processor but is also very useful in observing the SHA-1 Hash and AES-256 score. These are indications of how well the GPU can handle number crunching or real life image or video rendering. Higher score shows a better card.
The RX 570 shows significant improvement over the RX 470 especially in the OC Mode where it clearly races ahead.
Unigine Heaven 4.0 and Unigine Valley 1.0
A compilation of 26 beautiful scenes rendered and run via the raw GPU power of the system. It emulates any game or graphical work that you'll perform on the system scoring it on various parameter. We ran the test on Custom preset and settings at 1920x1080 resolution, quality to ultra and extreme tessellation.
Gaming Mode
OC Mode
These two benchmarks utilize the full 4GB VRAM on the RX 570 hence quite an accurate real-world rendering power can be made out from the results. These results are way over that of the RX 470 which manages a mere 1045 in Unigine Heaven and 1886 in Unigine Valley benchmark indicating that the card is better optimized for graphical based tasks.
3DMark Fire Strike
Fire Strike by 3D Mark is a test suit that plays a cinematic scene to determine the FPS, GPU temperature and CPU temperature scaling everything via a cumulative score. It is a great tool to benchmark your GPU since the render is mostly GPU & memory dependent.
A similar pattern over here aswell where we can see that the RX 570 is way faster than the RX 470 in graphical performance.
Crysis 3
I can't start gaming benchmarks without running my all time favorites Crysis 3 but its a game that no system loves! The CryEngine 3 behind this scenic beauty can bring down any system to its knees and I mean any system. I set everything to Ultra at 1920x1080 resolution with MSAA 4X and motion blur high.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
The latest installation of Lara Croft in the spectacular Rise of the Tomb Raider 2016 with stunning graphics and rich location makes it a great game to benchmark with while enjoying in the due course! We used DX12 and settings were at Ultimate on full HD resolution.
Alien Isolation
Its a great game for people, like me, who love to hunt down Xenomorphs or aliens with guns blazing all over the place. The game is highly optimized for PC and supports DirectX 11 with Tessellation, real-time Direct Compute radiosity, and shadows making it an ideal game to benchmark with settings at Ultra.
Battlefield 1
The latest installation to the Battlefield franchise and mind it the grandest one of them all aswell, Battlefield 1 is a prequel to the infamous Battlefield 1942 placing the players right in the middle of World War 1. Based on the latest Frostbite Engine by EA-DICE, Battlefield 1 takes advantage of DirectX 12 with asynchronous compute to weave together richly detailed worlds. It is heavily taxing on current-generation hardware, and you're handsomely rewarded for investing more into your graphics setup. Settings are at Ultra preset with full HD resolution.
Batman Arkham Knight
Since the game is powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 3 and supports DX11 tessellation so playing this game on 1920x1080 resolution with all settings maxed out can be any modern system's 'worst nightmare'!
Fallout 4
Fallout 4 takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston in the year 2287, 210 years after a Nuclear war. Bethesda's Creation Engine drives the game's strong first- and third-person presentation. The game takes advantage of DirectX 11 and can be highly taxing on most of the PC hardware. At full HD resolution shadow quality was set to high along with everything else cranked to max.
Far Cry Primal
A game that takes the concept of going back in time a bit too far, set in pre-historic central Europe where man is still fighting the forces of nature to become the dominant species on Earth. Based on Ubisoft's latest Dunia Engine, the game takes advantage of DirectX 11 and is heavily taxing on high-end GPUs. We used Very High preset at 1920x1080 resolution since that's what is considered the sweet spot for this game.
Ashes of the Singularity
Developed by Oxide Games & running on the Nitrous Game Engine Ashes of the Singularity is a real-time strategy game set in the future where descendants of humans (called Post- Humans) and a powerful artificial intelligence (called the Substrate) fight a war for control of a resource known as Turinium.
We've used the in-built benchmarking tool and the result is shown in an average of all the graphical tests conducted over various locations and topographies of the game. DX12 API, Quality set to Extreme, 4xMSAA and everything else to high.
DOOM
Developed by ID Software Doom or popularly written as DOOM is a reboot of the older Doom series. Its fast and scary with more than enough variety of guns that you can ever imagine or even use!
Its OpenGL and quality is set to Ultra.
Prey
After releasing the excellent Dishonored 2 France-based Arkane Studios hits it out of the park again with Prey, a first-person shooter published by Bethesda Softworks as a reboot from 11 years ago.
Unveiled at E3 2016, Prey uses the CryEngine graphics engine and audio from Audiokinetic's Wave Works Interactive Sound Engine (Wwise). It is exclusively DX11 based so no DX12 or Vulkan testing is possible.
As its the latest game to our list I don't have results for any other card but the STRIX RX 570 so I couldn't put up any comparative stats.
Noise and Temperature
The fans on the Asus ROG STRIX RX 570 don't spin till the card hits 54°C or more. We recorded the maximum temperature in Celsius that our card hit during extensive gaming & sound was measured in decibels from a distance of 3 feet. This was performed for both stock and overclocked speeds.
Also to mention while measuring sound we turned off any other fans on the test bench and set the fans on the MasterLiquid Pro on silent to minimize any discrepancy.
I did find that when under load the card tends to make a buzzing sound or coil whine which is the exact same issue we found in the RX 470 so be aware of it when you buy this card.
My Verdict
It won't be wrong if I say that the Asus STRIX RX 570 is mirror image of the STRIX RX 470 itself with a significant clock bump that offers a substantial performance boost at the cost of more heat and higher power consumption.The performance of the card is really good and it somewhat fills the performance gap that used to come up between the RX 470 and the GTX 1060 3GB in titles that required less VRAM but higher clock speeds. AMD has also provided larger headroom for overclocking on the RX 570 and it displayed a 7.4% higher speed than the STRIX RX 470. RGB implementation is subtle and I kind of like it but then the absence of a backlplate on the RX 570 is something that I gravely miss, not because of aesthetics but mainly due to the fact that it does aid in cooling which we desperately needed on an overclocked card like this.
As of now the pricing for the Asus STRIX RX 570 or for that matter any AMD card is all over the place, if you manage to find one, but considering its official $185 tag we can say that its aggressively priced and finds itself sandwiched between the slower GTX 1050Ti and faster GTX 1060 or RX 580.So who all should buy this card? Well anyone who's still rocking an old GPU mid range graphics card and wants to buy something that looks good and performs equally in the 1080p or a bit higher territories since anyone who already owns a RX 470 or similar card can take a pass on the RX 570 simply due to statistical reasons.
I recommend the Asus STRIX RX 570 OC edition to anyone who's on a budget and going out to buy himself a shiny new graphics card.
I give it a 8/10 earning our Gold Award!
Pros -
- Excellent performance on 1080p
- Good Overclocking headroom
- Premium looks and finish
- Can be a bit noisy at times
- No backplate
- Runs a bit hot under extreme load
The
latest installation to the Battlefield franchise and mind it the
grandest one of them all aswell, Battlefield 1 is a prequel to the
infamous Battlefield 1942 placing the players right in the middle of
World War 1. Based on the latest Frostbite Engine by EA-DICE,
Battlefield 1 takes advantage of DirectX 12 with asynchronous compute to
weave together richly detailed worlds. It is heavily taxing on
current-generation hardware, and you're handsomely rewarded for
investing more into your graphics setup. Settings are at Ultra preset
with full HD resolution.
.JPG)
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