AMD really wants you to upgrade your graphics card in 2017

From CNET: If you can't beat 'em, offer a really cheap alternative. That seems to be one of the themes of AMD's Radeon RX 500 series of GPUs, the successor to the not-very-old RX 400 series.

The most notable news is the way-cheap entry-level RX 550, which will start at $80 when it goes on sale in a couple of days. It's a step up from integrated graphics and it will make a cost-effective buddy for ultracheap FreeSync-compatible monitors.

All its strengths are about its low-profile, low-power design, and AMD extols its performance as 1.7 times better than its spiritual predecessor, the three-and-a-half-year-old R7 250, and about four times better than the last-generation Intel HD 530 integrated graphics processor.

I think if you're going to take the opportunity to update your graphics subsystem, however, you should spend a little more to sufficiently futureproof it. Or wait until you really feel the need. It's hard to make any judgements, though, since AMD hasn't given us much in the way of specs for the RX 550: 8 compute units, 1,183MHz boost clock, 2GB GDDR5 and HDMI 2.0b.

The rest of the GPU models -- the RX 580, RX 570 and RX 560 -- still don't seem to pose any challenge to Nvidia at the mid-to-high end of the range. The RX 580 at best competes with the GTX 1060. Instead they still fit into more of a "reasonable performance for a reasonable price" mold, offering less expensive alternatives to Nvidia's competing models. The slight increase in clock speed (up to six percent for the boost clock and about 15 percent on average for the base clock) and the slight tweaks to the Polaris architecture that make it "second generation" don't inspire thrills, and mostly contribute to decreased power draw.

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