5-Year-Old Radeon RX 580 2048SP Gets 16GB VRAM Upgrade

Zhiye Liu
·2 min read
Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP
Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP

We don't blame you if you've never heard of the Radeon RX 580 2048SP. It is a China-exclusive SKU, after all, and far from being able to compete with the best graphics cards. However, a Chinese manufacturer has breathed new life into the five-year-old Radeon RX 580 2048SP.

AMD China released the Radeon RX 580 2048SP in 2018, so the Polaris 20-based graphics card is a bit long in the tooth. While the Radeon RX 580 2048SP sounds cool because of the model name, it was, in essence, a rebranded Radeon RX 570 8GB with a moderately higher boost clock. The Radeon RX 580 2048SP may seem like a dud, but it sells pretty well in the Chinese market, so manufacturers still love it after all these years.

Kinology, a Chinese vendor, has given the Radeon RX 580 2048SP a new twist. Kinology isn't an official AMD partner. Like many other Chinese companies, it's likely just a local outfit that relabel and resells OEM graphics cards. Kinology (via realVictor_M) has released a particular Radeon RX 580 2048SP with an upgraded memory subsystem to 16GB of GDDR5. For comparison, the regular Radeon RX 580 2048SP is only available with 4GB and 8GB configurations. Kinology's model has triple or twice as much memory, depending on which SKU you compare it to.

Although Kinology gave the Radeon RX 580 2048SP more memory, the company used slower GDDR5 memory chips. The vanilla Radeon RX 580 2048SP uses 7 Gbps GDDR5, which across a 256-bit interface, provides 224 GB/s of memory bandwidth. In contrast, the Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP employs 6 Gbps chips, limiting the bandwidth to 192 GB/s. It has more memory, but the bandwidth takes a 14% hit.

Besides the memory, the Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP has nothing else to offer. It still uses the 14nm Polaris 20 silicon with 2048 shaders that boosts 1,206 MHz, so it's somewhat lower than AMD's reference 1,284 MHz boost clock. From a performance standpoint, the Radeon RX 580 2048SP is slower than the GeForce GTX 1060. The Kinology model is 170W, 20W higher than the regular model, probably due to the added memory chips. The Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP still employs a single 6-pin PCIe power connector.

The Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP sells for $83 on JD.com, which isn't a bad price. The faster Radeon RX 580 starts at $129 in the U.S. market, so the Kinology Radeon RX 580 2048SP's price tag gets a pass.