 A long time ago, in a fabrication plant far, far away. Well actually it wasn't that far away, and it was in June of 2016 that AMD dropped, dropped, dropped the RX 480, codenamed Polaris, in a wild marketing campaign evoking revolution. And for good reason. The 400 series performed really well for the price. Although, the flagship 480 was quickly overshadowed by Nvidia's 1060. Ha ha! The dangers of shooting first. But after 10 months of reloading, AMD is finally ready to fire again. With the only question being, what's in the chamber? Fire power, or fire poor? The Phoenix Autour is a full-sized, minimalistically designed keyboard, complete with Cherry MX switches and a new white backlit variant. Check it out at the link below. Come on, it's... Okay, maybe it's not funny, but it's silly. So let's get this out of the way. This is still Polaris. The same architecture AMD used for their RX 400 series. If you were waiting for AMD's highly anticipated Vega GPUs, then you'll be disappointed. But, if you were waiting for Polaris Enhanced, with a more mature 14nm FinFET process and tighter voltage and frequency regulation, translating into better power efficiency and higher clock speeds, then you and all the other holdouts with R9 285s or R9 380s should be amped as hell right about now. Well, hold on a second here, Linus. Is this just a shinier 480? Why is this even worth a video? And where is Vega? Great question. RX 570 and 580, then? Presumably due to slumping RX 480 4GB sales, AMD's partners will be putting more emphasis on the top tier 8GB version this time around. Though that won't have much of an impact on you, the consumer. And pricing looks to be, well, basically the same, with RX 570 coming in $10 cheaper on average than the 480 that it replaces. In other news, AMD's slide deck also had prominent mentions of both the RX 550 and RX 560, the former of which is brand new silicon, but we don't have those yet. So all we can say for now is that apparently the RX 550 is better than an integrated GPU at $80, and I would sure as hell hope so. And the 560 is a 460, but with a $10 price drop, and since enthusiasts were running around unlocking extra compute units with BIOS tricks, AMD went ahead and enabled those right out of the factory. And I guess there's some software news as well. As of the RX 500 series launch, AMD's Radeon driver for every card from 7000 series onward includes what they're calling Radeon Chill, a configurable frame limiter that improves thermals and power draw. When enabled, you can specify a minimum and maximum frame rate, and Radeon Chill will keep your game running within that window. Esports titles, for instance, are designed to be easy to run, and for that reason, they're notorious for ultra-high frame rates that go way beyond what a typical or even very high-end monitor would be able to display. So what this translates to for users is lower noise and more consistent performance without adding any input lag, and in some cases, they claim even improving it. Pretty cool, right? Ahahaha! Yeah, call me when it's in a notebook, you guys. Also, a bigger supported games list would be Swell, though to AMD's credit, the big esports titles are mostly covered here. Alright then, Linus. Enough stalling. Tell us how the RX 580 and 570 perform. You guys are so demanding sometimes, you know? Okay, so we tested our shiny new cards on both our Intel testbench and our Ryzen AMD testbench, along with equivalent last-gen cards from both AMD and Nvidia. Now, since AMD doesn't have reference boards for the 500 series, they actually sent us factory overclocked cards to test, so shout out to Asus and Nvidia, who provided us with some factory overclocked cards for the green side to level the playing field somewhat. Before you ask, by the way, we did try overclocking these cards further, but neither of them achieved a core overclock of more than 50 MHz over what they already shipped with. So then, as we can see in our performance testing, obvious things are indeed obvious, in fact. We've got a measurable, if not earth-shattering, performance bump over the RX 400 series. DirectX 12 and Vulkan both show us a wider improvement than DirectX 11, thanks to those APIs, more efficient rendering pipelines that favor AMD's GCN architecture. Although, again, the difference isn't that massive, and also of note here is the utterly uninteresting differences in performance between the cards across Intel and AMD CPU platforms. So, sorry, conspiracy theorists, but the rumors of Nvidia's drivers crippling Ryzen performance seem to have been greatly exaggerated. So, the TLDR, then, is that in a big surprise to no one, we're looking at a higher-clocked RX 480 and 470 for this release. AMD chose to iterate on their existing Polaris architecture cards in order to address some of their shortcomings against Nvidia's mid-range and budget lineup. Have they achieved that? Well, as far as performance is concerned, yes. Yes, they have. When it comes to power consumption, the story does fall apart a little bit, particularly with these factory overclocked cards. Though it should be noted that we didn't use Radeon Chill for our testing because it makes apples-to-apples comparisons go sour. So then, if you're an AMD fan, desperately waiting to upgrade your high-end Hawaii or Fiji-based GPU, then you get to keep waiting. But if you're more of a mid-range buyer who didn't mow enough lawns last summer for a 470 or a 480, then great news, because you get a little bit more for your money this year. So rock on, you sexy gardening beast you. So you heard from your nephew or niece or whatever that a VPN is a good idea, and you go and you look into it and you're like, what? 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