So I just lent some money to my good friend so he can afford a better RX 580 model that I recommended him.
Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ 8GB, he was originally going to buy an 8GB Pulse model that I told him is decent for his budget, but when I actually researched a little and saw the difference in cooling between the Pulse and the Nitro+, I just had to help him out a little:
The difference is huge, the Sapphire Pulse card despite good looks and a very cheap price (compared to other 580s here) will not allow for OC or silent operation judging by the cooler.
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I'm very excited about this since I'm his "PC guy", he currently runs an old i7-870 paired with some ASUS motherboard and I will OC the CPU to around 4,3/4,4GHz (max what his motherboard allows without instability) and see whether such an old i7 bottlenecks the RX 580 at 2560x1080p.
(I suppose it won't be a bottleneck but you never know for sure as it depends on the application)
With that being said... Would anyone care to see the results, is it even worth posting?
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@L.Lawliet The Nitro+ cooler is almost 2x as big... It also has much higher clock speeds out-of-the-box and might even OC to 1500MHz+... Decided it will be quieter, cooler, last him longer etc so I decided that I'll give him the money and he'll pay me back some time later, I believe it's really worth it judging by the difference in the picture...
Look (top - Pulse, bottom - Nitro+):
@PCGuy_5960 The 580 is still slower, it's just an OC'd 480 in terms of performance. Though I can borrow the card later and benchmark a few games if you'd like ^^
I also have a GTX 970 MSI Gaming 100ME Edition at home so I can throw that in as well It's in the 5820K rig though, but I don't think it'll matter for benchmarks even if my 6700K is faster in gaming as the 970 is a relatively slow card nowadays
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@L.Lawliet You can flash your 480 STRIX into a 580 STRIX if you want
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@L.Lawliet The Nitro+ has a 1411MHz base clock so it's already above your 480 even after OC... But as far as performance improvements go, this is it. I believe it boosts to 1444MHz, if he's lucky he'll surpass 1500MHz stable which is great :3 I also found out it has a dual-BIOS, RGB Sapphire logo and an extra 6-pin connector for OC headroom. Not to mention those huge heatpipes present on the Nitro Dual-X cooler But it's not worth upgrading from a 480. No way.
As for the BIOS flash, some people reported achieving better OC results after a successful flash, if you have a dual-BIOS switch then you might give it a shot (if you know what you're doing, this might be potentially dangerous to someone inexperienced)
@PCGuy_5960 I know there are games in which the 580 might outperform the Fury (at 1080p, cause the higher the resolution, the difference grows in favor of the Fury due to HBM and a wide memory bus and advantages of the Fiji architecture), particularly in overtesselated games such as Fallout 4 (because Nvidia Gimpworks) but there also are games in which the Fiji potential is unleashed and the Fury is MUCH faster than a 580, even faster than a 980Ti/1070 in some cases (Resident Evil VII for instance)
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@L.LawlietThat's the thing, Idk so don't want to take any chances
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@Morgan MLGman I don't think that the 580 can outperform the Fury TBH. (Maybe in only a few games it may be able to match it)