That's right, you can upgrade your AMD Radeon RX 480 graphics card to an RX 580 with a flick of a switch as one Sapphire RX 480 graphics card owner from the TPU forums has discovered. All you need to do is download the BIOS of an RX 580 card and then commence the BIOS flash and enjoy your new RX 580.
Upgrade Your AMD Radeon RX 480 To An RX 580 For Free
The user has been able to successfully flash his XFX RX 480 using the BIOS of Sapphire's RX 580 Limited Edition graphics card. Taking its clock speed from roughly 1300MHz to 1411Mhz, which is higher than any RX 480 graphics card available on the market today. The BIOS file is available on the TPU database and can be found here. Thanks to the dual BIOS feature of the RX 480 this process is safe because even if the BIOS flash fails you can easily switch back to your original working BIOS.
The user went on to test his newly flashed graphics card in The Witcher 3 and Furmark with great success. Although any attempts to overclock the newly flashed RX 480 using MSI afterburner resulted in an immediate driver crash, so keep that in mind. If your RX 480 is already capable of overclocking to 1.4GHz then this is not for you as it's not going to give you any additional headroom.
With that being said, what AMD has evidently done with Polaris 20 is up the voltage by precisely 0.1v compared to Polaris 10. This has enabled RX 580 cards to run at noticeably higher clock speeds than their RX 400 series predecessors. This indicates that it could very well be possible to make custom RX 480 and RX 580 BIOS files with even higher voltages to accommodate more aggressive overclocks.
If you've missed out on the RX 500 series launch you can check out our RX 500 series features and review round-up article here.
| AMD Radeon RX 580 (8GB) | AMD Radeon RX 570 | AMD Radeon RX 480 (8GB) | AMD Radeon RX 470 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GCN Cores | 2304 | 2048 | 2304 | 2048 |
| TMUs | 144 | 128 | 144 | 128 |
| ROPs | 32 | 32 | 32 | 32 |
| Base | 1257MHz | 1168MHz | 1120MHz | 926MHz |
| Boost | 1340MHz | 1244MHz | 1266MHz | 1206MHz |
| Memory Clock | 8 Gbps GDDR5 | 7Gbps GDDR5 | 8 Gbps GDDR5 | 6.6Gbps GDDR5 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit | 256-bit |
| VRAM | 8GB | 4GB | 8GB | 4GB |
| Transistors | 5.7B | 5.7B | 5.7B | 5.7B |
| Power | 185W | 150W | 150W | 120W |
| Process | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm | 14nm |
| GPU | Polaris 20 | Polaris 20 | Polaris 10 | Polaris 10 |
| Launch Date | 04/18/2017 | 04/18/2017 | 06/29/2016 | 08/04/2016 |
| MSRP | $229 | $169 | $239 | $179 |
