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The Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB arrives in a thin long box featuring artwork of a robot on the front.
A little background history on Sapphire and some product features populate the rear of the box.
Inside the small box is the card, alongside a software disc and some literature on the product. We recommend to always get the drivers direct from the AMD website as they are updated every month with new performance improvements and bug fixes.
The Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB is a subdued, but attractive looking graphics card. The front is plain black, but the rear is equipped with a very tasty looking custom backplate. The Asus RX 470 Strix Gaming OC Aura was NOT equipped with a backplate which seems like an oversight to me.
The card takes power from a single 8 Pin PCIE connector.
A V Bios switch and LED mode button are placed closely together at the other side of the card.
The I/O plate is fitted with a single DVI (Dual link) connector, two HDMI (2.0) connectors, and two DisplayPort (1.4) connectors.
There are a lot of screws on the Sapphire cards. The cooler is mounted via a series of screws and fan headers. The heatsink can then be seen clearly mounted to the PCB. When the cooler is removed, we can see two thick heatpipes running into two large aluminum fins on either side of the copper core. The memory and VRMs are also cooled by the heatsink system above.
Sapphire are using SK Hynix GDDR5 memory on the card. The card is equipped with 5 GPU power phases and 2 memory power phases.
The upcoming TriXX 3.0 software tool from Sapphire has control options for the lighting on the card. We don't have the final version of the software yet, so we can't really go into any detail.
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A test on [email protected] doesn’t tell me anything about the card. I don’t know how it acts with i5 2400 or any similar cpu, I don’t know if with this cpu it is much faster than GTX960 and I don’t know how much faster would GTX1060 be this case.
*spoiler* Your fps will be lower, depending on the game, with a weaker cpu. This test is designed to show you the full power of the card because that’s how card comparisons are made, not “But this card does better with a weaker cpu” though there are tests for that */end spoiler*
Next you’re going to ask them to test at 1680×1050?
A simple search led me to a video showing your CPU overclocked to 3.6GHz with a gtx 970 running rise of the tomb raider not bottlenecking it, Witcher 3 bottlenecking the 970 nicely, Crysis 3 shows your 2400 crying silicon tears of pain while the 970 sips electrical tea, and GTA V showing off the godlike optimization of the game, but your CPU running at higher usage than the 970 on average. Now add the performance deltas between the cards in question and the 970 and that’s how much more you’re getting/not getting because your CPU is borderline at 1080p
Wow, 1400Mhz OC…that’s impressive
The pricing is only confusing in the UK, in America it’s not confusing at all….and if it was, that still wouldn’t be as big of a point of contention as the author is making it seem. I feel as though we’ve encountered yet another example of reviewers constantly holding AMD to a higher standard than pretty much every other company. The card is excellent, Sapphire has always made excellent cards, and I feel as though the author is complaining either for the sake of it, or because reviewers just cannot let AMD escape untouched. Seriously, they’re never as hard on Nvidia (or any other company) as reviewers are on AMD…and I’m not even an AMD fan and it’s pretty evident.
Perhaps a word of warning to some potential buyers.
I purchased two Sapphire RX 470 OC+ cards two days ago. My intention was to run them as OpenCL compute devices in a system with other GPUs. The host computer, a fairly new latest-gen APU on a Gigabyte board [88 chipset] was perfectly stable in other configurations {GTX1070-GTX970, GTX970-GTX1070-FX470[XFX card], GTX970-GTX1070-XFX RX470-Integrated Graphics} but It failed to post as soon as I installed the first Sapphire FX470.
Over the course of a couple hours, I tried various configurations, frequently being forced to reset my BIOs to Post. My general conclusion at this point is that the firmware on this card is buggy. It’s fairly new so there are no updates posted.
The card has so far proved to be very unstable in configurations when any other GPU is present, including active integrated graphics. This included my attempts to reliably use it with only one Sapphire RX470 in my primary PCIe v3 x16 slot and a second Sapphire FX470 in my second PCIe v2 x16 slot with APU graphics disabled.
I’m going to give them one more shot with a clean install of Windows but I’m not holding out much hope.
This might not be an issue for you depending on your config but if the cards do, in fact, have buggy firmware that affects their stability in one way, I would be concerned that other issues would also eventually surface.
Otherwise, I can say that from a compute standpoint, the other OC’ed XFX RX470 card I have performs on par with my reference design RX480 card but it costs less and they’re far more available these days. On the down side, the OC versions seem to have their voltage tweaked so their power consumption is actually a bit higher than my stock RX480. The Sapphire 470OC+ has a 8-pin PCIe power header while the standard 480 has a 6pin.
That Wattman Screenshot is actually really useless unless you upload it in a resolution in which we actually can read the numbers 😀
Hi, I understand that you have both the Sapphire Nitro+ RX470 and the XFX RX470…
Which, according to you, is the quieter?
And which is the cooler?
so, would you mind uploading the Wattman settings in higher resolution?
that also means you’re an idiot
Go for Sapphire Nitro+ RX470. The build quality is very superb. I’ve the 8GB version of Sapphire Nitro+ RX470 and it look very nice.
anyone can tell me what a chipset on rx 470 4gb?
hi nvidiot!
The RX470, RX480 or RX570, RX580 all use AMD Polaris Architecture. Not sure if this will help.