ASRock announces Phantom Gaming AMD GPUs

ASRock, a company best known for its motherboards, has confirmed weeks of rumours with the announcement that it is entering the graphics card market with a range of AMD-based products dubbed Phantom Gaming.

Marking ASRock's first entry into the add-in graphics card market, the AMD-exclusive partnership sees the company releasing a range of Radeon RX500-series cards from entry-level RX550s through to the top-end RX580. 'ASRock finally expand into the graphics card field,' says LL Shiu, ASRock's chief executive officer, during the announcement which has been rumoured for weeks. 'We are happy and proud to team up with AMD, our strong and reliable partner, and of course we look forward to bringing out more interesting and competitive products in future.'

Based on AMD's Polaris graphics platform, rather than the newer Vega, the range is split into two: A budget Phantom Gaming family and a higher-end Phantom Gaming X. Both launch with two core models: The Phantom Gaming Radeon RX550 in 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 flavours and the Phantom Gaming Radeon RX560 in, again, 2GB and 4GB GDDR5 flavours; and the Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX570 OC and Phantom Gaming X Radeon RX580 OC, both of which include factory overclocks and 8GB of GDDR5 memory.

In all cases, the cards feature double-bearing fans - two in the case of the Phantom Gaming X family, one for the more compact Phantom Gaming cards - and support for ASRock's own Phantom Gaming Tweak Utility for monitoring of temperature and fan speed as well as adjustment to core and memory clock speeds and voltages for manual overclocking. All also include OC, Default, and Silent modes, with the latter - which reduces the clock speed and voltages to pre-set levels - spinning down the fans.

'ASRock is an industry leader with some of the world's best AMD-based motherboards being sold in the market today, and we are thrilled to team with them to help us bring incredible gaming experiences to gamers with Radeon GPUs,' claims Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group. 'The new ASRock Phantom Gaming Series, based on the powerful Radeon RX 500 Series graphics cards, will provide gamers the best of Radeon features and performance which will include FreeSync, the ultimate technology for smooth and stutter-free gaming, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition for seamless streaming, sharing and gameplay capture now with mobile device functionality, and Radeon graphic's highly optimized DirectX 12 and Vulkan performance.'

ASRock has not yet confirmed whether it plans to launch a range of cards based on Nvidia's graphics processors. More information on its Phantom Gaming range is available on the official website.