The company PowerColor has a really interesting series of products called Devil and I have been using some of these over the years and now it is time to make another deal with the Devil, this time it is not Devil 13, but Red Devil - PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480. AMD's latest lineup of RX 470/RX 480 GPUs have gathered a lot of interest as being a good choice for mining Ethereum - lower power usage and high hashrates for cards that are not that expensive actually. Now the interest in these cards has moved to Zcash as well, though the 280X is the real winner with Zcash and the latest miner from Claymore. Anyway, here I'm going to give you a short overview of what the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB video cards are offering and what their Zcash mining performance is like...
The PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB video cards are really well built and offer some interesting and useful features not only for miners, but for gamers as well. Features such as three fan design using 3x 80mm cooling fans with double ball bearings and double blades design. This ensures that you have a more silent cooling solution that should last you longer and be easier to maintain as the dust deposition thanks to the special design of the fan blades. The cooler itself is a serious one as well with enough area to dissipate heat efficiently and multiple big heatpipes to transfer it across the whole surface. There is a backplate that is intended to protect the board from bending due to the weight of the card as well protect small SMD elements from incidental damages and maybe even to help up a bit with the cooling. The video card is designed with enough power phases and digital PWM control to optimize efficiency and allow for nice boost of performance with overclocking.
The video card itself looks very well designed and built with a black and red styling to go along the Red Devil line of the product, the naming probably is also some kind of a word play with AMD being the "RED" company and Nvidia being the "GREEN" one. PowerColor however only makes AMD-based video cards, it does not play with the green company... and they do manage to come out with some really great products in the higher-end like this particular RX 480 model.
The package includes the video card, but aside from it there are not much accessories included... this has become somewhat of a trend lately even with very expensive GPUs... not even basic accessories such as cable adapters getting included. There is a disc with drivers, a quick installation guide and an interesting card... one that invites you to join the Devil Club. That last one is really a great idea from PowerColor that goes along the line of their special series Devil branding.
PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 comes with 5 video outputs - three DisplayPort connectors, one HDMI connector and a DVI-D Dual-Link. There are no analog connectors available anymore, so if you are still using an analog connection to a monitor, then you will need some kind of an adapter such as DP to DSUB or HDMI to DSUB. This is also important for miners that will be building multi-GPU mining rigs with no monitor attached to any of the video cards and will use remote management. It is best to go for a HDMI to DSUB adapter that will simulate the presence of display connected to the video card and will allow you to remotely monitor and control the system. Do note that not all HDMI to DSUB adapters will work by telling the video card that there is actually a monitor connected, some will out of the box, for others you might need to do a resistor mod on the DSUB connector.
The dual-blade design of the cooling fans is really interesting and they do seem to work well regarding the proper and not so noisy cooling of the card, not yet sure if they do manage to perform well in reducing the dust buildup on the large heatsink below... that will need some time to check. It is interesting to note that the fans actually are not rotating when the GPU temperature is less than 60 degrees Celsius, this is to make the card silent when not under heavier load. For regular use and for gaming there could be something nice from that, but for mining you probably will not care much about that feature, but will want to have the fans running all the time in order to keep the operating temperatures low.
There is dual-BIOS on these GPUs along with a very tiny switch that you can use to switch between the two different settings - the two options are a more balanced overclock with a quieter operation or maximum overclock. It all depends on your preferences, just make sure you are careful with the BIOS switch as it is really tiny and if not careful enough using it you may just break it with some more force being applied.
The PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB video cards are equipped with an external 8-pin PCI-E power connector for supplying enough power for the proper operation of the GPU, especially if/when you decide to further overclock it from the stock settings. If using multiple of these GPUs for mining you still might want to go for powered PCI-Express risers, even though there is an external PCI-E power connector available that should be capable of providing more than the needed power.
A quick look at the PCB of the video card and the heatsink intended for cooling it, as you can see the cooling solution is actually larger than the board and all that is with the purpose of keeping things cooler and more silent. Efficient heat transfer is ensured across the whole surface with the use of 2x 8mm and 2x 6mm diameter heatpipes and the three 80mm fans on top, so no need to run the fans at maximum RPM under load to provide better airflow when you have larger cooler surface available.
The backplate of the card does look really nice and does its job of protecting the PCB of the video card safe indeed and since it also gets pretty hot it also works as an extra surface for dissipating additional heat from the board, though definitely not as effective as the actual cooler of the card. Having a good external airflow inside your computer case or mining rig can also further improve the efficiency of cooling.
So in short the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 is really well designed and should last long for both gamers and miners alike, so it is really a lot like an actual deal with the devil... nah, just kidding... or am I...
Here are the specifications of the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB video card, it comes with Samsung video memory for those that might be interested in that for video BIOS modding and changing of the timings of the memory.
Here is the video card when in idle mode with the fan actually not stopped, but running at lower RPM... I actually don’t like video cards that stop their cooling fans, not a big fan of higher operating temperatures for the sake of keeping the card silent. Of course you can always modify the default fan profile and run it at low RPM even when the GPU is not under load from a game or from a miner.
Here is how the situation changes when the video card starts mining Zcash at about 40+ H/s, it manages to run at max settings in terms of GPU frequency while maintaining low operating temperatures with the fans far from being noisy. Of course Zcash is not using a lot of power, so the video card is not maxed out like it could get with a more demanding game or another crypto mining algorithm used. Using it for Ethereum or Zcash mining however does not currently put out the maximum energy consumption of the GPU, so you get silent operation and lower operating temperatures.
As for the performance that these PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB GPUs manage to get in Zcash (ZEC), here is the result from six of them in a multi-GPU mining rig using the Claymore Zcash miner. Getting around 41-43 H/s with stock settings and no additional overclock or BIOS mods, pretty good result, though you can easily squeeze a few more H/s with some extra optimizations. The PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 480 8GB video cards are probably among the best option for the moment for mining and even gaming of popular crypto currencies like Ethereum and Zcash with Sapphire's Nitro+ RX 480 probably being equally as good choice as these.
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