Hello everyone,,
So if you hop on over to newegg and look at the selection of Polaris cards, it becomes very apparent that GPP is well and truly alive. MSI has discontinued their GAMING X series and only provides their Armor series for the RX 570 and 580, and a weird single fan RX 580. Now the Armor MK2 is noticeably better than the Original armor cards, but it's still not at the level of the GAMING X cards. Anyone notice how the Mech 2 cards never existed in the first place?
Gigabyte has pretty much reduced their lineup to their crap tier coolers. They did release an XTR 580, but that card is so rare, it might as well be a myth. I'm convinced there was like one shipment of them and was immediately discontinued. Gigabyte does get bonus points for having some the only AMD cards available right now with RGB lighting with their AORUS cards, if that's something you care about.
ASUS is so hilariously bad compared to the others though. They only have their Strix 570 available at an insane markup. It's the only other card that has RGB. They have their Dual-fan OC Edition RX 580, which has an awful cooler. The STRIX/AREZ RX 580 is non-existent.
The only card manufacturers that are even trying are the AMD exclusive ones. XFX has some hit or miss cards but overall, their cards are very solid. Powercolor has some straight up garbage in the Red Dragon 580, but saves it with the very well made Red Devil series. Asrock has some decent but basic cards. Sapphire has the best showing with Their Nitro and Pulse cards. Both are very solid cards.
The lack of better coolers from the bigger brands and missing features like RGB are going to push people away from AMD, but I don't know what they can realistically do about it. They're in a tough spot since they don't have any leverage. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the Navi launch cards from MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS end up being either reference cards or just reused Polaris coolers. Vega at this point is an absolute disaster, with availability issues and a severe lack of options. At the very least, AMD's motherboard selection has vastly improved since the launch of Zen 1.
