XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy Video Card Review
Final Thoughts and Conclusions
AMD’s third iteration of it’s ‘Polaris’ Gaming GPU shows that they are doing everything they can to get every last ounce of performance out of this architecture. They’ve gotten higher clock speeds than previously achievable on ‘Polaris’ and it does well on most E-Sports titles at 1080P and a fairly decent number of games at 1080P. If you are looking for a card that is capable of averaging over 60 FPS on Fortnite, PUBG, DotA 2, Destiny 2, CS:GO, Overwatch, Rocket League, Rainbow Six Siege or WOW: Battle For Azeroth, the RX 590 is more than capable. Our first review sample that we were able to try out was able to get a 4.5% GPU overclock, so there is also little overclocking room left in the RX590 for overclockers. Is the performance enough? For 1080P gaming the performance of the Radeon RX 590 is sufficient, but it does tend to run on the hotter side and use a fair bit of power.
The XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy is priced at $279.99 shipped and right now comes with a game bundle that includes Devil May Cry 5, The Division 2, and Resident Evil 2 at participating retailers. That is a pretty good value if you were going to buy any of those game titles. Right now there are some pretty sweet deals on the AMD Radeon RX 580. For example, the ASUS Radeon RX 580 8GB card is available for $199.99 shipped. Gamers purchasing a Radeon RX 580 or Radeon RX 570 graphics cards can choose two of these games for free. So, you can get a card with up to 12% more performance than a Radeon RX 580 when you pay an extra 40%. Okay, that isn’t really a fair comparison since we are using a sale price. The actual suggested retail price for the Radeon RX 580 8GB is $229, so when you compare SRP’s it’s about 22% more. The RX 590 just happens to have a 22% higher TDP as well! The choice between a Radeon RX 580 and the Radeon RX 590 is going to be tough for most people. Right now it seems like the Radeon RX 580 8GB for $199 with promotional rebates or sales feels like the best deal and you get two free game titles. You can find the Radeon RX 580 cards on Amazon here.
AMD also has to worry about cards from NVIDIA as the GeForce GTX 1060 6GB starts at $229 and then you have the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB cards starting at $339. The Radeon RX 590 is conviently $50 more than a GTX 1060 6GB and $50 below the GTX 1070 8GB cards, both of which come with Monster Hunter: World thanks to a current NVIDIA game bundle promotion. The $200 to $300 price range for discrete graphics cards will give you a number of choices right now.
At the end of the day the XFX Radeon RX 590 Fatboy is a solid performing graphics card as one might have expected. AMD has refined the Polaris GPU about as much as humanly possible and the fact that this card is staying in the Radeon RX 500 series is telling of what may be coming next year from AMD.
Legit Bottom Line: The AMD Radeon RX 590 breaths new life into an architecture first introduced in 2016 and it’s enough to allow AMD to have a solid graphics card for 1080P gaming under $300.