PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 OC

Most of the (relatively few) RX 590 cards on the market are beefed-up, factory overclocked boards and the PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 OC is no exception.  The Red Devil’s main competitors at this writing are the Sapphire Nitro+ RX 590 and the Fatboy RX 590 from XFX. All of them are of course built around AMD’s Polaris 30 XT GPU. This is is a refined version of the Polaris 20 XTX used for the RX 580 and based on the GCN 4.0 (Graphics Card Next) architecture. What differs are the clock frequencies and the smaller production process, 12 nm at GlobalFoundries instead of 14 nm.

Like its predecessor, the GPU has 2,304 shaders, 144 TMUs (texture mapping units) and 32 ROPs (render output units) and the same overall feature set. Thanks to the higher clock speeds, the RX 590’s performance is improved by up to 15% over the RX 580. Another plus is that this improvement comes with no additional power draw (same TDP) compared to the predecessor.  

PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 OC Features

As the OC in the name implies, the PowerColor Red Devil comes with a slight overclock out of the box. The GPU boost clock is increased from 1545 MHz to 1576 MHz – a 2% difference. 

RX 590 Reference Design VS Custom Boards

Unlike the Nitro+ RX 590, the 8 GB of GDDR5 VRAM runs at stock speeds, however. PowerColor uses a custom PCB and a dual-fan, triple-slot cooling solution.  

The short but relatively stocky cooling solution is complemented with a backplate and an LED-lit Red Devil logo in red on top of the card. 

Performance

Thanks to the newer and more efficient version of Polaris, the RX 590 is about 10-15% faster than the RX 580. With its slight factory overclock, the PowerColor Red Devil RX 590 OC is about 2% faster still. On the downside it will use a bit more power than the reference design for the same reason. While the RX 590 is consistently faster than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060, the new Turing-based GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is a bigger challenge. Although power-efficiency is improved, the RX 590 is still much less efficient than Nvidia counterparts.

System and PSU requirements

The power supply (PSU) requirement for the RX 590 is 500 Watts and the TDP (thermal design power) is 175 W. Because of its higher boost clock, the Red Devil RX 590 OC will require a bit more power than the reference board. It needs 1x 8-pin and 1x 6-pin PCIe power connector and PowerColor recommends a 600W PSU.

Reviews

This card is part of our RX 590 GPU guide from Q1 2019. 

Bit-tech: PowerColor’s Red Devil implementation, specifically how it balances power consumption, clock speeds, temperatures, and fan speed/noise, leaves a lot to be desired …

Hardwarezone Singapore: The Radeon RX 590 isn’t a bad card. However, if we’re talking strictly about gaming, there are just better alternatives out there.

Overclock3D: What the Red Devil does have is the endlessly consistent PowerColor build quality. They are always producing good quality cards and this is no different.