Conclusion
...if your particular games engine runs well on the Radeon, the Strix is a solid buy for gaming at a QHD resolution.Summer 2016 has been witness to both AMD and Nvidia filling out their premium mainstream graphics with new technology, and the first meaningful comparison occurs in the £250-£300 space occupied by overclocked partner Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1060 cards.
At the very upper end of each GPU's pricing echelon are Asus cards under the Strix banner. Beautifully built and offering a premium experience from every facet, there's intrinsic merit in comparing the RX 480 and GTX 1060 iterations.
The RX 480 OC model, priced at £290, offers class-leading performance in Doom Vulkan and Hitman, ties the GeForce in The Division and Warhammer, but loses out in Dirt Rally, Fallout 4 and Tomb Raider. Never has there been a time where the performance of the hardware is so predicated by the optimisations of the software, so if your particular games engine runs well on the Radeon, the Strix is a solid buy for gaming at a QHD resolution. That said, the small improvement over the significantly cheaper reference board - less than five per cent on average - is a concern for partners looking to differentiate on performance.
How the Radeon RX 480 shakes out over time is unknown - the Doom OpenGL and Vulkan benchmarks are eye opening and encouraging - so we wait with bated breath to see how Radeon and GeForce performance evolve over time.
Solid cooling performance
Silent when idle
Onboard FanConnect headers
Three-year warranty
No memory overclocking
Small perf increase over reference
Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 480 OC 8GB
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The Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 480 OC 8GB graphics card is available to purchase from Scan Computers.
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At HEXUS, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any company representatives for the products reviewed choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.
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