MSI will be lending its Armor branding to the AMD Radeon RX 580 2048SP graphics cards, as reported by VideoCardz today. The Taiwanese manufacturer will be offering the Radeon RX 580 2048SP Armor in 4GB and 8GB versions; however, it's expected they'll only be available in Asia.
The Radeon RX 580 2048SP has been one of the most controversial graphics card releases. Long story short, the card is basically a Radeon RX 570 with a 40MHz higher higher boost clock. Major AMD partners, like Sapphire, XFX and ASRock, have already launched their aftermarket Radeon RX 580 2048SP models. Now, it seems that MSI wants a piece of the cake too.
It's no surprise that the MSI Radeon RX 580 2048SP Armor looks awfully familiar to the MSI Radeon RX 570 Armor. Some might even argue that they're the same graphics card sold inside different boxes. On the specification front, we're looking at the same outdated Polaris 20 silicon built under GlobalFoundries' 14nm process node with 2,048 Stream Processors. MSI sells the Radeon RX 580 2048SP Armor with 4GB or 8GB of GDDR5 memory operating at 1,750MHz (7,000MHz effective) on a 256-bit memory interface. Independent of the memory configuration, the graphics card has a 1,168MHz base clock and 1,284MHz boost clock.
MSI's offerings employ the brand's black and white dual-slot Armor 2X cooler. The cooling solution consists of copper heatpipes infused to the baseplate and a massive heatsink with countless aluminum fins. The twin TorX cooling fans feature dispersion fan blades to maximize airflow without compromising silence. MSI also equipped the fans with its fans ZeroFrozr technology so they only start spinning when the graphics card's operating temperature goes over the 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold.
The MSI Radeon RX 580 2048SP Armor only requires one 8-pin PCIe power connector for external power. The graphics card possesses two DisplayPort outputs, two HDMI ports and a single DVI port.
MSI didn't reveal the pricing or availability for the Radeon RX 580 2048SP Armor. VideoCardz claimed the card isn't expected to be sold outside of Asia. Evidence supporting that comes from the fact that the AMD SKU is only listed on AMD China currently.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.