Power Usage and Final Thoughts
So a lot of our other tests like compute benchmarks don’t apply to a crossfire configuration. The same goes for tests like our noise and temperature testing. Those are all specific to the card. I will say that going Crossfire with the XFX Fatboys with their 2.5 slot configuration does require a motherboard with the extra space between the cards. I was able to do that with our X299 Apex. In fact, I had a whole other spot so both cards had room for good airflow, even with their size. I was a little harsh in my original review on the styling of the XFX cards but I will admit they look better together as a pair.
Now for the last test, I did want to take a look at overall power usage. The single XFX RX590 Fatboy pulled a lot so I wasn't really surprised to see the pair together up above any and all of the single card configurations in both of my tests but even then they were way above most everything else. In the 3DMark Fire Strike benchmark using the combined test, I saw our test rig pulling 616 watts, for comparison the GTX 2080 Ti, the fastest card on the market was pulling 455. Taking the CPU mostly out of the equation in the AIDA64 Stress Test was a little lower but still at 549 watts!
So with the testing finished up let's take a look at the results as well as the pricing. Now as I mentioned in my original review, the RX580 is still a much better value when you aren’t taking into account the free games that they are including with the RX590. So even going in I knew two RX590’s wouldn’t be the secret value. But with each card at $280 that puts the pair at $560. You at least for now should be able to get two sets of the awesome game bundle that is worth just under $180 and I assume you should be able to sell off the second set to recoup some of your cost there. But at $560 before all of that, it puts us in the range of the RTX 2070.
So do the RX590’s outperform the RTX 2070? Well in the synthetic tests they actually do with them being 31% faster in Fire Strike on the Performance setting. Time Spy was much lower with them beating the RTX 2070 by 7% there. As for in game, well there was at least one where the RX590 Crossfire configuration outperformed the RTX 2070 and in a lot of the games with Crossfire support it was at least close. But then you have all of the games without support as well where the RTX 2070 stomped the pair of RX590’s. So, as usual, I have to say that going with a dual card configuration isn’t really the best solution. It can, however, be a cheaper upgrade option later in the future, but that is only if the games you play support it. You still want to get the fastest single card setup you can afford, especially in this case where the RX590 is designed for 1080 and some 1440p use, stepping up to two cards doesn’t translate to higher end card performance at 4k or even 1440p and frankly if you are spending that much for a video card or two cards you will most likely be looking for 1440p or 4k performance.
