Asus Radeon RX 470 Strix Gaming OC 4GB

[HEXUS]

The second-rung Polaris examined.

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[3s-gtech]

With pre-order RX 480 4GB cards coming in at £180 or so, this is a bit silly. Price needs to drop to £150.

[Nifl]

Yeah, the pricing is pretty damn silly. Don't see any reason to buy one of these over a 480. Did someone at AMD fail at math or something?

[scaryjim]

Slightly odd that the only cards that seem to be in stock are Sapphire Nitro+ OC (in both 4GB and 8GB variants, incidentally) when we've got a Strix review!

Pricing is definitely higher than I expected though - I guess they don't mind leaving a big gap for the RX 460 to fill (assuming that comes in at the expected $99 price point for a reference version) but to sit this so close to RX 480 pricing makes no sense (unless reference RX 480s are going to disappear shortly, that is). As it stands, Overclockers have a reference RX 480 @ £219 and an 8GB Nitro+ OC RX 470 @ £219. Very odd...

[Tarinder]

I'm hearing that RX 460 will cost $99 for the 2GB and $129 for 4GB, with the premium partly attached to AMD charging more for GPUs outfitted with 4GB of memory.

[Katar]

Looking at Overclockers there is a Sapphire reference RX 470 at £165 which makes sense when compared to an RX 480. Anything over £185 when a 4GB Nitro+ RX 480 is £199 doesn't make a lot of sense, and the 8GB versions even existing is just mental.

[scaryjim]

I'm hearing that RX 460 will cost $99 for the 2GB and $129 for 4GB, with the premium partly attached to AMD charging more for GPUs outfitted with 4GB of memory.

Cheers Tarinder. If that's right I guess a $149 RX 470 would be too close to the RX 460. Tricky fitting all those GPU SKUs into a fairly tight market place, I guess. I did wonder if the 4GB RX 480 was just a market filler to allow them to get a card out with a $199 launch price, but it was always meant to give way to partner RX 470s in the long run. The current pricing certainly suggests that's the case.

According to AMD's launch slides RX 460s become available on Monday? I will be paying very close attention to pricing and availabilty on those

[watercooled]

As for the card itself I'm quite impressed with power consumption compared to the 480: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/...RIX_OC/22.html

As I've said before, with past generation cards we'd often see the die harvests didn't lower power consumption all that much compared to the full dies (e.g. 970 vs 980) but both AMD and Nvidia seem to have really improved on this recently as we see the 470 drops from 163 to 121 watts under typical gaming load, actually *improving* efficiency over the 480!

Interestingly, idle and media playback power consumption has improved dramatically too, the latter of which I'm not so sure can be attributed to hardware differences so I wonder if AMD have improved that with drivers? It would be nice to see if the 480 also improves on newer drivers (the 470 was tested on 16.8.1-July29-16.30RC11 whereas the 480 was tested on Crimson 16.7.2 WHQL).

As for pricing, the reference 470 is $180 which puts it top of the perf/$ charts at TPU but will we actually see many reference cards?

[cptwhite_uk]

Pricing seems off as others has said. I was expecting it to be AMD's dark (mainstream) horse, but not at those prices.

I would like to see the (reference) prices as follows:

RX 480 8Gb @ £210 - Great price / perf at upper mainsteam end
RX 480 4Gb @ £180 - Bests the GTX970 at a lower price point
RX 470 8Gb @ £180 - Somewhat redundant, but gives choice to the market
RX 470 4Gb @ £150 - Best mainstream all rounder for mainstream gaming @ 1080p
RX 460 4Gb @ £120 - Budget MOBA solution, worst price/perf but serves budget end of the market
RX 460 2Gb @ £100 - Budget MOBA solution

That would put all products in a relatively strong position and cover all mainstream price points.

[Tarinder]

I've just been linked to an entry-level RX 470 4GB at £165. It has overclocked memory to boot, so pricing is being adjusted sensibly post-launch.

[scaryjim]

As for the card itself I'm quite impressed with power consumption compared to the 480 ...

I think this was to be expected, tbh - for one thing I'm pretty sure AMD's been harsher on the power limit than they were with the RX 480; as the second rung card they haven't had to wring every last drop of performance out of the RX 470. I suspect that if you manually overclocked it and upped the power limit accordingly you'd find it pulling around the same power for around the same performance as a stock RX 480.

It's basically the Nano to the RX 480s Fury X - only with a few shaders trimmed. Limit the power and drop the voltage slightly and you get good performance with a singificantly lower power draw. Be interesting to see other implementations though: I find it slightly off that ASUS haven't upped the power limit sufficiently to make it reach its boost clock consistently, and I suspect that Sapphire's Nitro+ OC versions will hit their boost frequency more reliably but also draw more power...

[Kumagawa]

I can't believe this draw more power than the GTX 1060. No wonder AMD hasn't released it's big chip GPU's there power draw would be terrible.

[watercooled]

I think this was to be expected, tbh - for one thing I'm pretty sure AMD's been harsher on the power limit than they were with the RX 480; as the second rung card they haven't had to wring every last drop of performance out of the RX 470. I suspect that if you manually overclocked it and upped the power limit accordingly you'd find it pulling around the same power for around the same performance as a stock RX 480.

It's basically the Nano to the RX 480s Fury X - only with a few shaders trimmed. Limit the power and drop the voltage slightly and you get good performance with a singificantly lower power draw. Be interesting to see other implementations though: I find it slightly off that ASUS haven't upped the power limit sufficiently to make it reach its boost clock consistently, and I suspect that Sapphire's Nitro+ OC versions will hit their boost frequency more reliably but also draw more power...

Yeah it's not too surprising but like I say with past GPU generations, perf/watt was often significantly worse for the die harvests - maybe power was still allowed to leak through fused cores or something?

[jigger]

I think the pricing is pretty good. You can buy the Sapphire RX470 Nitro for £179 and looking at the performance on offer the bang for buck ratio must be very high. I'd bet the RX 470 is even better than the R9 390 on the bang for buck scale.

[The Hand]

The majority of 470s seem to be in the £200 range give or take £20. I think the prices are a bit too high at the moment. I would be tempted to just go for the Sapphire 480 8GB Nitro for £240 and at least you have the option of using VR at some point in the future.

[kalniel]

I've just been linked to an entry-level RX 470 4GB at £165. It has overclocked memory to boot, so pricing is being adjusted sensibly post-launch.

At £165 it's the new 960, and with better outlook for future games.