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Yesterday AMD launched their new RX 470 graphics card, and we were on hand to cover the Asus Strix Gaming OC solution. Today we take a look at the new Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC 4GB which features a custom dual fan cooler with enhanced core and memory clock speeds.
This Sapphire RX 470 Nitro+ OC card looks very like their higher end models that we have reviewed in recent months, which is not a bad thing. Its a dual fan solution with thick heatpipes visible close to the PCIe connector.
| 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 Sapphire RX 470 Nitro + OC card has has both core and memory overclocked. The core is running at 1260mhz, and the memory is running at 1,750mhz (7Gbps effective). This is 10mhz less than the Asus version of the RX 470, although Asus didn't overclock the GDDR5 on their card.
While AMD told me in email that they could not confirm 8GB RX470's would be available it would appear that MSI have already released a version. I received one a few hours ago and its in my test bed as we speak and I plan on publishing that review as soon as I can. I am currently chasing the price of this 8GB model, because with 4GB RX470's only £10 less than 4GB RX480's it would appear that an 8GB RX470 could actually cost more than a 4GB RX480. What a bizarre launch this has turned out to be.
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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.