Looking to swipe some market share abroad from Nvidia before the arrival of its GeForce GTX 1060, AMD launched the Radeon RX 480 at the end of June. Codenamed Polaris ten, the company's beginning fourth-generation GCN GPU appeared to have everyone rooting for information technology leading up to its release, and although we were largely satisfied with its 1080/1440p operation, the card wasn't without the odd hitch.

At that place was the whole power draw controversy that AMD initially denied before backpedaling and coming up with a prompt fix -- adept on them. Thankfully, those issues seem to be behind the states, but all the same they appear to have set the RX 480 a bit off class. Although information technology could be unrelated, more than than a calendar month has passed since launch and availability on the new Radeon is still poor with almost no board partner cards.

Every bit expected Nvidia did follow upwards with its GTX 1060 weeks later and equally of writing there are dozens of boards on offer from several manufacturers competing to get your dollars. So for now at least I tin't imagine AMD is recovering much of that lost market share. I for 1 am desperate to become my hands on a 4GB RX 480 as I believe this will be the cost per frame rex.

But hopefully today AMD can become back on rail as it's gear up to release its 2d Polaris x part, the Radeon RX 470.

The RX 470 should be an heady product for a few reasons. First, this is an affordable sub-$200 GPU within the reach of most gamers. Coming from the showtime Polaris x board, we look this to exist an extremely capable 1080p gamer while 1440p should too be playable. The RX 470 also just comes in a 4GB version, which I personally feel is the correct choice here.

I was a bit letdown with the RX 480 after we were promised a $200 GPU and then concluded up with a $240 GPU (for the 8GB model instead of 4GB). Granted $40 isn't a lot, merely at this price bespeak it but isn't worth paying 20% more for double the retention when it won't yeild a single extra frame for gamers targeting 60fps. Don't try to tell me the 8GB model is more "futureproof" either, though I'll exist happy to revisit the topic in a twelvemonth's time.

Anyway, there's no need to contend over which RX 470 version you should buy, because at that place is just a single option and I feel it offers the most sensible retentivity capacity for a GPU of its caliber. With that said, let'south move on to check out the RX 470 in greater detail...

Meet the Asus RX 470 Strix

Although y'all could say that this Polaris x model is a few cards short of a full deck, it'southward worth noting that the core configuration hasn't been cut down that much. We're only seeing an 11% reduction in SPUs and TMUs when compared to the fully fledged RX 480, while the ROP count remains at 32.

AMD has nerfed the base of operations operating frequency, dropping it by 17% from 1120 MHz to 926 MHz. That said, in that location'south but a v% discrepancy in the boost clock frequency which has been reduced from 1266 MHz to 1206 MHz.

Connected to the GPU is 4GB of GDDR5 memory, though we should point out the AMD spec only calls for 1650MHz retentivity here, which provides a throughput of 6.6Gbps. In dissimilarity the 4GB RX 480 comes with 7Gbps retentiveness, while the 8GB version is armed with 8Gbps memory.

The aforementioned 256-bit wide memory double-decker is in use, though due to the slightly slower clocked GDDR5 memory the bandwidth has been decreased from 224GB/due south for the 4GB RX 480 to 211GB/s, a 6% reduction.

When all'due south said and washed the RX 470 is good for up to 4.9 TFLOPS of compute ability when operating at the maximum boost frequency. In contrast the RX 480 is good for five.viii TFLOPS, while Nvidia'due south GTX 1060 chucks out just 4.iii TFLOPS.

AMD has downgraded the Thermal Design Power (TDP) rating to 120 watts for the RX 470, that'due south a twenty% reduction when compared to the RX 480. It is, however, the same TDP rating as the GTX 1060, and so again a single 6-pivot PCIe power connector has been used.

On mitt for testing nosotros don't have an AMD reference card, which is somewhat of a relief, instead the Asus RX 470 Strix card has been used. The Strix model does come factory overclocked, simply since nosotros take just tested with other reference or stock clocked graphics card we downclocked the Asus RX 470 to encounter the AMD reference clock speeds.

For those wondering, the Strix comes mill overclocked to 1250MHz out of the box, but can be set to 1270MHz using the OC mode in the Asus GPU Tweak II software. The GDDR5 retentivity has been left at the standard 1650MHz (6600MHz data charge per unit) frequency.

The carte du jour measures 242mm long and 129mm tall. The dual-slot DirectCU Two cooler measures 42mm broad and Asus says it is 30% cooler and three times quieter than the AMD blower style reference cooler. They are targeting sixty degrees, which is considerably ameliorate than the 80+ degrees the RX 480 reference menu operates at.

Similar the RX 480 the 470 supports DirectX 12 along with OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.0 and Vulkan 1.0. The Strix model also comes with 2 dual-link DVI ports, a single DisplayPort 1.4 output with HDR support and a HDMI two.0 port supporting 4K @ 60Hz.