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The Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB is another well built card from AMD's leading GPU partner. We really didn't expect anything less.
Asus may have removed the backplate from their Strix version of the RX 470 but Sapphire decided it was important enough to keep. Our thermal imaging camera proved that Sapphires implementation eliminated PCB hot spots while the Asus card was running 28c hotter in positions close to the VRM's. It was a good decision by Sapphire to keep the backplate.
Sapphire also opted for a less aggressive fan profile and a higher thermal temperature profile, set at 75c. Due to this we noticed that the Sapphire RX 470 Nitro+ OC 4GB held a higher clock speed than the Asus RX 470 Strix under load, even though the Strix was actually clocked 10mhz higher. It is worth pointing out that Sapphire are the only partner at this point who have also overclocked the GDDR5 memory. This gives a minor boost to frame rates.
Unfortunately for Sapphire, they are the same victims of pricing concerns that I discussed in detail in KitGuru's Asus RX 470 Strix OC review also published today. This Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC will be priced at £188.99 inc vat on Overclockers UK making it £11 less expensive than Sapphire's own, faster RX 480 Nitro + OC. It's a fairly ludicrous market situation to be discussing and one that has caused much head scratching in the last week.
Is there is any reason to buy the Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC over the RX 480 Nitro + OC which we reviewed on July 27th (HERE)? Honestly, I can't find any. The RX 470 has 16 less texture units and 256 stream processors have been disabled. I think paying £11 to get those back is a worthwhile expenditure, especially when noise levels and cooling performance are basically identical between the solutions. Sapphire don't incorporate weak cooling solutions on any of these cards.
In the build up to launch today I have been talking with Sapphire, AMD and leading etail partners such as Overclockers UK trying to get my head around the price points. Unfortunately pricing is such a critical concern in this sector that it completely changes my recommendations.
We have been told that while these Nitro+ OC RX 470's are expensive there will be some cheaper ‘reference style' RX 470 options available. Sapphire for instance are releasing a reference design RX 470 for £164.99 inc vat. The clocks are set at 932mhz base, 1,216mhz boost with 7000mhz GDDR5. It is equipped with a single fan (dual ball bearing) reference style AMD blower cooling system (see image above). We can't comment on how good, or bad this version is, as we have only been sent the Nitro+ OC version of the RX 470. If you are further restricted in budget to £170, then this cheaper reference design is probably a decent option, but I need to raise a few concerns over potential noise levels and perhaps even some thermal throttling.
For me, this has been a rather disappointing, disorganised launch from AMD. Both Sapphire Nitro+ OC and Asus Strix RX 470 cards are fine implementations of a sub £200 gaming solution, but with the faster 4GB Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC available at £199 there really is only one card we can recommend to readers with a £200 budget.
Next up, I will be looking at some 8GB versions of the RX 470, which are actually more expensive than the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB.
I was told two days before this launch directly by AMD that they couldn't comment on whether an 8GB RX 470 even existed, and within a few hours time, I had one on my lap, delivered straight from Asia by MSI. Yes, AMD wouldn't confirm the existence of a card that I had on my desk in front of me, supplied by one of their partners. AMD PR has been so utterly ill informed throughout this entire launch that I actually wonder if they communicate at all internally.
You will be able to buy the Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB from Overclockers UK for £188.99 inc vat. Our honest advice is to spend the extra £10 to get the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB instead. It is a more powerful card well worth the marginal increase in price.
Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.
Pros:
- great build quality.
- dual fan cooler works well.
- no coil whine.
- backplate.
- quiet.
- good overclocking headroom.
Cons:
- The superior Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC is only £11 more.
Kitguru says: The Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB is a card that performs well at 1080p. The price point would be more acceptable if Sapphire's own RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB wasn't just £10 more. You get more texture and shader power for half the price of a Domino's pizza.
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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.