Days ahead of its official launch, leaks suggest the RX 480 is an impressively cool and power-efficient chip

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is on a roll thanks to its RX480 chip hitting the perfect price point in a market where NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) has no significant answer when it comes to an equivalent price, i.e. performance GPU. There are, however, a slew of details including various benchmarks where it allegedly takes on Nvidia’s GTX 980 and essentially beats it conclusively in various leaked benchmarks and screenshots available at Chinese forums.

With production line photos and FireStrike scores readily available at various forums, the RX 480 can essentially push well above 1.6 GHZ, possibly contributing to far faster real world performance for its consumers than when it runs at stock on about 1.2 GHZ. More importantly, the RX 480 is an impressive performer at a fraction of the cost one would expect it to be at $199. It is, by far, one of the most power-efficient chips in the market available to users with a raw power draw of about 100W and remains generally cool at under 60 degrees mostly.

Based on the fact that it could essentially pull as much as 150 watts if required and remains generally stable at thermals remaining under 60, it could very well become an overclocker’s heaven. Also, given that it can do as much as 1.6 GHZ already and could potentially even push non-reference designs makes it a large issue for Nvidia’s GTX 1070, which is priced at $379, much higher for the reference design.

Nvidia’s push for the top-end via its Pascal lineup, which saw it enter the market with the GTX 1070 and the GTX 1080, priced at $379 and $599, respectively, left a massive gap at the mid-tier for consumers unwilling to splurge such a massive amount of cash as an investment into better visuals for gaming, rendering or otherwise. It went a step further, however, pushing into the market via its Founder’s edition GPUs of the same variants. To date, AMD does not have a suitable market contender for Nvidia’s top-line GPUs and it aims to hit the mainstream market higher in a bid to capture the bulk of the virtual reality market.

With idle temperatures of about 37.5 degrees and the GPU pushing just north of 62.7 degrees at full load while running stress tests, AMD has a winner at its hands which is going to be thermally stable, extremely power efficient, and would offer the best performance in several price ranges once it launches a week from today. The 4GB base model is expected to retail at about $199. The 8GB variant is expected to push to $229 as per confirmation by AMD Poland. AIB partners are expected to have custom cooler versions within a price range of $199-299 with various modifications, cooling solutions, and overclocking potential available across the board. If executed right, the RX 480 could very well stop the Nvidia hype train in its tracks, even triggering a premature price cut to gain traction for the GTX 1070 which, for now, remains out of stock at most retail outlets and ecommerce vendors.