Card Layout and Photos
So unlike the RX 580 from XFX that I took a look at right after the 500 series launch, the RX 570 RS doesn’t have that new cooler design. The RS comes with a cooler similar to last years design. It has a black fan shroud with a simple and clean design that doesn’t try too hard to look fancy or “edgy”. The bright red fans are a little in your face and really they will clash with anything but a black and red color scheme but they are large and should do a good job cooling. If you look through the fans there does seem to be a lot more fan than heatsink though so there is room for improvement if additional cooling is needed, I won’t know that for sure until later though. The fans are lacking the clips of last years quick release fans for swapping the fans out. I would have liked to of seen them on this one in case anyone wants to change up the colors later.
The cooler design has a few oddities as well. Specifically, it uses heatpipes to pull heat from on top of the GPU out into the heatsink but one of the heatpipes seems to be missing. If you look from the bottom we can see two holes that are empty, where the one pipe is not there. I don’t mind this cooler only having two heatpipes, but I can’t help but feel having that hole isn’t going to help cooling much. The cooler design lacks a little height as well as I mentioned when looking through the fans. The fans blow down through the heatsink onto the PCB so there should be good cooling of all of the components that aren’t touching the heatsink and for airflow, you need to keep in mind all of that warmed air is going to vent into your case. The shroud has large open areas on the end, top, and bottom for the air to flow so there aren’t any restrictions, but it's not going to want to go out the PCI slot like on a reference or blower cooler.
One thing that really stood out to me about the overall design was just how much longer the fan shroud is than the rest of the card. The second fan ends just past the end of the PCB, backplate, and heatsink and the shroud could end right after that but it doesn’t. It ends up adding an extra inch to the length of the card for no reason at all.
Up on the top edge, in addition to the fan shroud and a peak at the heatpipes, we have two other things going on. For starters, the card uses an 8-pin power connection and it is flipped around backward with the clip on the PCB side. The PCB is notched for clearance and it makes sure you can get to the clip while not cutting into the cooling space too much. You can see the heatpipe is really close for example, that wouldn’t be possible with the clip on the other side. Next, to the power connection there is also a very tiny switch, this lets you flip between the two available BIOS as well.
On the PCI end, the RX 570 RS has an XFX shaped ventilation hole for a small amount of airflow. Then around it you get a DVI port, three DisplayPorts, and one HDMI to give a mix of display connection options. From this end, we can get a better look at how tall the card is as well. The fan shroud goes a little high and if you look closely, really it looks like it could be shortened as there is a big gap between the shroud and the heatpipes up on top.
The back of the RX 570 RS actually has a backplate and it is blacked out to match the fan shroud or at least a very dark gray. There are holes drilled in it for some ventilation as well as the XFX logo on it in a solid black. There are holes to be able to remove the heatsink from the back as well as all of the smaller screws that hold the backplate on as well. Then, of course, there is a serial number sticker stuck on there with the model information and a barcode with your serial number for RMAs should it be needed.
