New budget RX 480 build.. Advice?

The 6600K needs a Z170 board if you intend to overclock . Some are around that price but I would pay a little extra
http://pcpartpicker.com/product/GYH48d/asrock-motherboard-fatal1tyz170gamingk4
$124

You can off set that by buying a lower wattage psu . You need, at most, 500 watts

Your motherboard doesn't support overclocking or SLI. I would suggest using the locked i5 6500, a B150 motherboard, and a GTX 1070 rather than Xfiring two 480's. You could then use a cheaper PSU.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($197.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: MSI B150M Pro-VD Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($63.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill NT Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($31.98 @ Newegg)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card ($429.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Corsair SPEC-01 RED ATX Mid Tower Case ($47.99 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: XFX TS 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($62.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $834.92
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-06-27 18:14 EDT-0400

I would suggest that if you have a 1080p monitor that a graphics card more powerful than an RX 480 is a complete waste of money, because if anything even the RX is overkill

I mention this because 1440p monitors generally do not fit into the budget description of a build .
I also mention it because GTX 10XX cards are massively overpriced because nvidia appears to be having trouble making them in any reasonable numbers. A sure sign they were rushed to market just to beat AMD despite not being ready for retail

I would say Nvidia is keeping them overpriced, because their original announcement of price was false. Board partners don't want their aftermarket coolers being cheaper than the reference design, because technically speaking, their cards perform much higher. This is why we've seen 1080's appear at nearly $700, and then immediately taken down from listings. Sure it could be an error by the seller, but I think in reality Nvidia just wasn't really truthful, and is trying to milk out as much cash as possible. Clearly there is a market for $700 cards, as shown by the 980Ti, so I think we're all just waiting to see how it plays out.

Your motherboard does not support crossfire. It supports something AMD call CrossfireX and board manufacturers fail to distinguish because it makes their product look better . The second graphics slot on a crossfire X board will be limited to x4 bandwidth and will cause a performance hit. The only boards that can run proper crossfire can also run SLI

Yeah..... no.
CrossFireX is just a renaming of the old CrossFire technology after a slight change several years ago. We still say CrossFire, because everyone knows what it is, but technically, all new cards use CrossFireX, which is why the CCC shows it as CrossFireX regardless of your multi-GPU setup.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_CrossFireX
Wiki is calling it a rebranding. What ever you call it, all new cards use CrossFireX, and most people continue to use CrossFire terminology.
EDIT: As to what you said about 16x versus 4x, that is 100% accurate, but it has nothing to do with the actual Crossfire support. There are motherboards with just Crossfire that have dual 16x slots.

No ......... yeah

Crossfire and SLI split the pci-e lanes from the first graphics slot between two cards . Any board that can crossfire can also SLI

Crossfire X is not a "rebrand". Its an additional and completely distinct AMD technology designed originally for allowing a graphics card to run in support of the first gen APU's graphics systems. It also works via chipset for systems not using an APU .
The x4 slot starts to cripple the performance of anything more powerful than a moderate graphics card , which then cripples the performance of the primary card . Using crossfire X for a pair of Rx 480's would work . But the benefit would be far less than if you were using a board that can actually crossfire

A single 480 is said to have performance similar to the R9 390, so with XFire and factoring in scaling losses, will not even perform better than a single 1070, and certainly not the 1080. Consider the cost of two cards plus a bigger PSU plus more heat and noise, This is why I recommended the 1070.

Actually badactor there are people saying the RX480 performs close to the Fury, and benchmarks showing crossfire RX480's performing better than a gtx 1080 in DX12.

Wow, I'll have to investigate that then. Initial benchmarks put it no where near a Fury. Maybe they have improved the drivers?

We will know soon enough.

So Tom's review is out. Depending on what your doing, the performance of the 480 is still more less equivalent to the GTX 970/R9 390. A certain game or app may be better optimized for it, but a Fury it is not. I still say the single GTX 1070 would be a more practical and powerful solution.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-polaris-10,4616-11.html

In terms of monitors it does appear to perform on par with the GTX 970 [ with a 12% overclock] in the Tomshardware tests when you are on a monitor.
Plenty of information out there that in VR it performs relatively better than current generation cards

But either way you get GTX 970 OC performance for a much better price.
As to which card would be better for a build then the RX wins IMO at 1080p . It was maxing out every game , except AoS, on a 1080p monitor If that is the resolution you are playing at then there is no point in paying more for a graphics card

Personally I'm definitely planning on buying one. I will wait for aftermarket coolers though. And for a DVI connector

For a single card and a $200.00 budget, it would get the nod, still impressive performance. I agree about waiting for the board partners, seems there can be a problem with the PCIe power draw in addition to the sketchy cooler.

anort3:

"It uses 5 watts less than a GTX 1080 and a GTX 1080 is 90% faster. The reference cooler works...if you can stand 47db and 5000+ rpm out of the little blower fan they put on it. Most worryingly is the power draw though. Possible damaged motherboards incoming?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-rx-480-p...

It's obvious they had such a fail with the new arch they had to ramp up the clocks to get this level of performance.

From the non fanboy articles I've been reading GloFo's/Samsung's 14nm arch just isn't designed for the high clocks needed for something like a high end GPU where as TSMC's 16nm arch Nvidia's using is. The engineering types seem to think it will take AMD at least 2 more years to get 14nm to where 16nm is today. These rumors have been going on for months and months. This release pretty much proves them true.

GTX 1080 is 314mm²
RX 480 is 232m²

The GTX 1080 is only 35% larger but it performs almost 90% faster. Power efficiency also favors Nvidia considerably at around +80%.

AiB partner cards will fix the dangerous PCI-E power draw and allow for at least some overclocking. But then...."we did witness it pushing 284W for extended periods of time while gaming. Remember we saw 249W under normal clocks while gaming. 14% more wattage got us a 6% overclock that was stable."

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/06/29/amd_radeon_rx...

Those numbers negate any sort of low power claims that was supposed to make this an attractive card in the first place. More overclocking will just make those numbers worse.

The GTX 1060 is coming soon. That will be the real test. Not that I believe for a second that the 480 was designed from the ground up to be midrange. I'd bet the 1060 will be faster than a GTX 970 and do it while using less power though. I'm going to have a hard time recommending the 480 unless the AiB partner cards have some new age AMD space fairy magic."