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Today we take a look at the third RX 470 card to hit our labs – the MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G. This card ships with a dual fan custom cooler, as well as enhanced out of the box clock speeds. The talking point? This is the first RX 470 we have looked at which ships with 8GB of GDDR5 memory.
If you followed our launch reviews, you will know that I was quite surprised, and equally disappointed with AMD partner card RX 470 retail pricing. The cards we reviewed were priced only £10 less than the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB – which made little, if any, sense to me. Sadly prices haven't dropped any over the weekend, but we hope in coming weeks that some deals will appear for RX 470 solutions.
If launch pricing of the 4GB RX 470 cards seemed bizarre, then today takes a turn into the twilight zone. This MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8GB is priced at £229.99 inc vat, which is £30 more expensive than the Sapphire RX480 Nitro+ OC 4GB. Adding 4GB of GDDR5 memory does come at a cost, but I have to admit to more head scratching this week.
On a slightly more positive note at least the MSI RX470 Gaming X 8GB is equipped with a very attractive two tone dual fan cooling system which makes it easily the best looking RX 470 available today.
| GPU | Radeon R9 290X | Radeon R9 390 | Radeon R9 390X | Radeon R9 Fury | Radeon R9 Fury X | Radeon RX 480 | Radeon RX 470 |
| Shader Units | 2816 | 2560 | 2816 | 3584 | 4096 | 2304 | 2048 |
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 64 | 32 | 32 |
| Graphics Processor | Hawaii | Hawaii | Hawaii | Fiji | Fiji | Ellesmere | Ellesmere |
| Transistors | 6200M | 6200M | 6200M | 8900M | 8900M | 5700M | 5700M |
| Memory Size | 4GB | 8GB | 8GB | 4GB | 4GB | 4GB/8GB | 4GB/8GB |
| Memory Bus Width | 512 bit | 512 bit | 512 bit | 4096 bit | 4096 bit | 256 bit | 256 bit |
| Core Clock | 1000 mhz | 1000 mhz | 1050 mhz | 1000 mhz | 1000 mhz | up to 1266mhz | up to 1206mhz |
| Memory Clock | 1250mhz | 1500mhz | 1500mhz | 500mhz | 500mhz | 2000mhz | 1650mhz |
An overview of the Ellesmere RX 470 in GPUz. AMD’s RX 480 has 2,304 stream processors, the RX 470 has 2,048. Both have 32 ROPS, however the RX470 loses 16 texture units, from 144 on the RX 480 to 128 on the RX 470.
The MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G is clocked at 1242mhz in Gaming mode, while the GDDR5 memory runs at 1,650mhz. In OC mode the core is tweaked to 1254mhz (6.6Gbps effective) and the memory gets a very minor increase to 1,675mhz (6,7Gbps effective). We always test graphics cards from all the companies in the fastest state, as we would imagine most KitGuru readers will do the same (or even overclock manually to the limit).
There will be no overclocking page in this particular review today, because if we increased core speed at all past the ‘OC' rated speeds in the latest version of MSI Afterburner, our test system would crash.
I want to see an RX 480 XFire and MultiGPU review… Even an RX470 XFire review would be great… Zen should make it go fast…
<<tw. ★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★✫★★::::::!ir266m:….,….
I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head, rx470 4gb, and rx480 8gb as the only choices would have made the whole thing better and clearer for everyone. Even their own sales!
8gb pointless on a 470
wow thats just so wrong
several games already take more than 4gb.
what’s pointless is 4gb on a 480
this is not about games, rx470 have weak muscles to carry out 8gb
“this is not about games”? What do you mean with that?
You essentially always pay for GPU power. A 8GB 470 might have too much VRAM, which is useless as worstcase, yet a 4GB 480 will have unspent GPU power when you have to reduce the textures cuz of VRAM. Increasing texture quality is only limited by VRAM and has no effect on the GPU-limited framerate.
A surplus on VRAM is always better than a surplus of GPU power.
Does anybody knows if this card really support 5 independent screens at once?
Thanx in advance
RX470 is actually have same design like RX480. I’ve the Sapphire Nitro RX470 8GB OC with default clock @1260 MHz that reach 5.1 TeraFlops which is same like the stock reference RX480.