TechSpot: Those who can afford a $400+ graphics card and actually managed to hunt down a Pascal GPU will no doubt be pleased. For the rest of us, or rather for the majority of us, we have been waiting for something else, and for most that something could be AMD's Radeon RX 480.

Touted as the perfect VR solution for the masses, AMD is hoping to claw back a bit of market share with the new Radeon RX 480 which is aimed at the mainstream $200-250 segment, with other affordable Polaris GPUs expected to follow.

Whether on purpose or forcefully so, AMD is flipping how they used to release new GPUs, starting with mainstream products this time and working up to the high-end stuff. This might make sense given the company's current market share predicament, though I personally feel the move to the 14nm process has almost forced AMD into this strategy. The process may need to mature before larger, more complex GPUs can be created in sufficient volumes.

Then again, with over 80% of the PC gaming market dominated by $100 - $300 graphics cards, this is where the bulk of the market share is won and lost. AMD's first strike will be made at the $200 price range ($240 for the 8GB model) with the RX 480.

LegitReviews: The AMD Radeon RX 480 has 5.8 TFLOPS of compute performance thanks to having 36 Compute Units containing 2,304 stream processors based on the latest GCN 4.0 technology. AMD is using dynamic clock speeds on RX 480, so it has a base clock of 1120MHz and a peak boost clock of 1266MHz. The RX 480 comes with either 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit wide memory interface at speeds starting out at 7Gbps for 224 GB/s of bandwidth all the way up to 8Gbps for 256 GB/s of bandwidth. From what we gather it is up to the board partner to use the memory that they want, so be sure to keep an eye on that if you are looking to purchase one of these cards.

When it comes to video outputs the AMD Radeon RX 480 has three DisplayPort 1.3/1.4 HDR outputs and one HDMI 2.0 video output. The rear grill also has been ported for optimal airflow to help the hot air from the Polaris 10 GPU to be exhausted out of the case. No DVI output is present on a sub $250 graphics card, so make sure you pick up an adapter if you need one for an older display.

HotHardware:In terms of its noise output, the Radeon RX 480 is usually quiet, but not silent. When idling, the card is inaudible over the other components in our test system (we test inside a mid-tower chassis with a Corsair HX series PSU and Arctic Cooling CPU air-cooler on the CPU). Under load though, the Radeon RX 480 was just a touch louder than the GeForce GTX 970. The pitch of the RX 480's fan was also more noticeable, according to our ears. With that said, we would still consider the RX 480 quiet overall -- it's just not the quietest of the bunch.

TechReport: The RX 480 8GB card we tested delivers a hair more performance potential than the GTX 970, but at a significantly lower price than the average going rate for that card on Newegg right now. We'd have to test the 4GB RX 480 to be truly sure of its value proposition, but just imagine a similar dot at $200, and AMD might have quite the hit on its hands.

Going by the measure of performance potential that average FPS provides, the RX 480 is sometimes slightly faster than the GTX 970, and it's sometimes a little slower. Those familiar with the long-running battle between the GeForce GTX 970 and the Radeon R9 290 should be getting a sense of deja vu right now. What's nice about the RX 480 is that AMD is extracting that kind of performance from a die that's roughly half as large as Hawaii with what is, in many respects, a smaller engine inside.

Indeed, what's most notable about the RX 480 compared to past Radeons of any price is its consistently smooth frame delivery. Where AMD's older cards have trailed the GeForce competition in delivering smooth gameplay—often by wide margins—the RX 480 chalks up a huge improvement in both our advanced 99th-percentile frame time and "badness" measures compared to the Radeon R9 380X. We're completely comfortable calling the RX 480 the equal of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 970 in those regards. That's excellent progress from the red team, and we hope that whatever mojo is responsible for this turn-around works its way into every future AMD graphics card.

On the other hand, the RX 480's power consumption and noise figures aren't as rosy as we might have expected them to be. Our power consumption tests today aren't perfectly comparable to those in our older reviews, but one Radeon R9 290-powered system with a similar CPU and motherboard drew about 400W under load when we reviewed that graphics card as part of a larger test a while back. The Radeon RX 480 delivers similar performance to that card while shaving about 140W off the total power draw of our system. TR readers helpfully point out that using board power as a rough guide, the RX 480 is about 90% more efficient than the R9 290 before it, considering the performance we measured. Either way, that figure seems to fall short of the 2.8X performance-per-watt increase that AMD often touted with Polaris.