Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition Video Card Review
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
The AMD Radeon RX 580 release hasn’t brought anything revolutionary to the table, but we do like the fact that AMD was able to do some improvements to the Polaris GPU architecture that allows for higher clock speeds to be run. Seeing retail RX 580 cards coming out clocked above 1400MHz is impressive when you consider than when the Radeon RX 480 launched they were only getting 1120MHz base speeds and 1266 MHz boost speeds. Here we are 1.5 years later and we are getting 1411MHz out of the box on cards like the Sapphire Radeon NITRO+ RX 580 LE and if you flip the BIOS switch to the second position it defaults to 1450MHz. We of course slapped the card on our test system and ran all the tests without knowing this and all of our test results are done in the stock BIOS switch position of 1450MHz. Overclocking the card up to 1470MHz from 1411MHz only gave us less than a 3% performance boost, so we aren’t going to go back and re-test everything for such a small difference.
What makes the Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition a limited edition card? We asked Sapphire that question and we were told that it is named limited edition because they have a smaller product line of this model compared to the standard NITRO+ due to the binning process needed to get cards that can hit 1411MHz and 1450MHz core clocks.
At the end of the day the Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition is a pretty damn nice card. The performance is solid for 1080P gaming and can most certainly handle the majority of game titles at 1440P. VR performance on the card is good in the benchmarks that we ran on it and we even jumped into Serious Sam VR: TLH and had a blast on our HTC VIVE. The card is visually stunning as we like the gun metal finish and the quick change fans. Sapphire did a really good job on this card and our only gripe would be the fan noise at full load, but they could only do so much with the Polaris GPU that AMD gave them to work with.
The Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition card is only available as an 8GB model and runs $279.99 plus $4,99 shipping at Newegg under part number 100411NT+8GSR. That just happens to be the same price as the EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB FTW+ Gaming ACX 3.0 graphics card that we benchmarked it against today as it is available for $279.99 shipped after a $20 rebate and you also get a pick of a game title (Honor or Ghost Recon: Wildlands) with a purchase of that model. Both of these cards are great for 1080P gaming and do pretty damn good at 1440P if you reduce the image quality down a bit on the tougher game titles. The level of performance you get from these $280 graphics cards is impressive and if you haven’t upgraded your graphics card in over a couple years these two cards might be very tempting!
If this is a little too expensive for you still, but you like the level of performance we suggest taking a look at the Sapphire Radeon Plus RX 580 8GB GDDR5 graphics card that is priced at $229.99 plus $4.99 shipping. It’s $50 less and comes clocked at a lower 1366 MHz on the core clock, but it still has the same number of stream processors (2,304), has a backplate and should be able to overclock almost up to the same level. It doesn’t come with the same fancy GPU cooler, backplate and removable LED fans, but the level of gaming performance you’ll get is close to the same.
Legit Bottom Line: The Sapphire NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 Limited Edition is a sweet looking card that is ready for 1080P, 1400P and VR gaming on the latest tittles!