AMD is selling more RX 480 reference cards by the second but more people are either looking for GTX 1060 stocks or waiting for custom cards like the new Gigabyte RX 480 G1 Gaming Series.
Custom partner cards are often faster and more powerful than reference cards because they come factory overclocked and have better cooling solutions. They also have more overclocking headroom which means the performance can be stretched further compared to the reference cards.
Gigabyte's Radeon RX 480 G1 Gaming series cards for AMD will be released in two variants. There will be both a Gigabyte RX 480 G1 Gaming 4GB and 8GB GDDR5 version for customers to pick depending on their budget, Ocaholic.ch has learned.
Just like all G1 gaming cards from Gigabyte, the RX 480 variants will come with the WINDFORCE dual-fan cooling solution complete with RGB lights to complement any colored build. The cards would be best suited for large cases that have sufficient airflow inside to prevent other components from heating up.
XFX also has their RX 480 Black Edition which now has 3DMark benchmark results. The XFX Radeon RX 480 Black Edition scored 5959 in the 3DMark FireStrike Extreme benchmark which is near the 6192 score of the NVIDIA GTX 980, Mobipicker reported.
One reason for the high score of the custom XFX Polaris 10 card is the factory overclocked boost clock of 1338MHz which users can still crank up. It is certainly faster than reference cards as it provides more performance using the single 8-pin power connector with 6+2 phases.
Theoretically two XFX Radeon RX 480 Black Edition cards in a CrossFire setup could beat a single GTX 1080. However, most video games today do not really perform well for multiple GPU setups even with NVIDIA's SLI technology.
AMD is still selling the reference RX 480 cards but some are already selling them to buy a GTX 1060 from NVIDIA. In addition, Gigabyte has not yet announced the price and release date of its Gigabyte Radeon RX 480 G1 Gaming edition cards as well as XFX with their Radeon RX 480 Black Edition.