Waffling On Video Cards – AMD RX480 Reference Design And The Replacement Card I Bought

AMD Radeon RX 480 Reference Design – I returned it.

Not a fan boy of either Nvidia or Ati/AMD Radeon as I use both brands in various of my systems.

I thought I’d replace my ageing Nvidia card with the new Radeon card and bought one with the AMD reference design from MSI, it came with a whopping 8Gb of GDDR5 RAM. Because it was hyped very much by the reviewers who all got review samples. I decided to return it and ask my money back.

Why? It ran way too hot in my system (over 85C and not cooler than 50C) and it made the system lock up, reset and reboot. On two of my PCs actually. With decent brand 750 watt power supply, dual bios solid state caps Gigabyte and MSI motherboards and a good airflow in both cases. I am used to cards running a lot less hot – due to the fact that they probably have better third party cooling systems with double or triple fans. Also the drivers weren’t compatible with a lot of the emulator software that I am running.

I decided to return it and either wait for the drivers to mature and for a good third party cooling solution to appear for the RX480 or go back to Nvidia. Then the GTX 1060 became available from Asus the Strix edtition which are known to run cool and be very silent. For me it was a no brainer, it’s more expensive than the RX480 and it being a Strix card even a bit more on top of that but totally worth the money – prices of this card seem to vary a lot and it’s advised to shop around to get the best price. Ranging from €279 to €402 depending on the brand and cooler on it.

Mine was €346 two days ago but sells for €403,95 in the same shop right now.

Reviews on the GTX 1060

Comparison of the RX480 vs the GTX 1060