Sapphire Radeon RX 460 Nitro 4GB

[HEXUS]

Does the smallest Polaris make sense?

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[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Faster than I expected - shame it is isn't the full Polaris 11 GPU with 14% more shaders. I agree it needs to be cheaper too.

[scaryjim]

Yeah, seems to perform well. I spottted some leaked numbers a couple of days ago that put it some way behind a GTX 950, but obviously not.

Ebuyer seems to have the best supply of cards, including a powercolor in stock at £99: http://www.ebuyer.com/754200-powerco...60-2gbd5-dh-oc

EDIT: also, was worried that Sapphire saw fit to give it a power connector, but it looks like that's mostly for overclocking performance given the power draw figures...?

[sykobee]

So a different conclusion is that the 2GB £100 version should generally beat the GTX 950 OC for £30 less?

[Jedibeeftrix]

Do we suspect AMD is keeping the full-die 1024 shader chip for the launch of its mobile-gpu products?

Additionally, presuming we do eventually get a a desktop sku with 1024 shaders, might we hope it will come with 4GB and (some models at least) a 75W TDP?

[scaryjim]

So a different conclusion is that the 2GB £100 version should generally beat the GTX 950 OC for £30 less?

Depends on implementation, and whether a 2GB frame-buffer would hold it back in any games. So far there doesn't seem to a be a 2GB card reviewed anywhere (nor one without a 6pin power connector), so it' shard to be sure...

EDIT (crosspost):

Do we suspect AMD is keeping the full-die 1024 shader chip for the launch of its mobile-gpu products?

Certainly possible - they don't need to restrict power usage so much on the desktop and I suspect they can qualify more dies at 1200MHz if they disable a couple of shader blocks. I suspect the mobile parts will run a fair bit slower on GPU clock and pull a fair bit less power, but perform similarly due to the higher number of enabled shaders (think of the comparison between a Fury and a Nano, for instance).

Additionally, presuming we do eventually get a a desktop sku with 1024 shaders, might we hope it will come with 4GB and (some models at least) a 75W TDP?

With 4GB, almost definitely. With a 75W TDP, I'm doubtful - Tom's Strix 460 pulled 90W during gaming with a 1256MHz core, which isn't a huge overclock (< 5%), and power draw usually scales linearly with clock speed. I suspect that a reference RX 460 @ 1200MHz can pull over 80W, and is likely to hit its power limit fairly hard, scaling clocks back 10% or more...

[The Hand]

The Doom Vulkan results are pretty impressive.

[scaryjim]

The Doom Vulkan results are pretty impressive.

I think what we'll see for the RX 460 is that it's about par in DX11/OpenGL, but it really shines in DX12/Vulkan. It's definitely forward looking. At £130 I don't think it's particularly good value. At £100 it might be if it doesn't get held back by a 2GB framebuffer. We'd need a 2GB card review to know for sure...

Overclockers also have the Powercolor 2GB card for just under £100, as well as a HIS on preorder at a similar price that seems ot use a much shorter PCB...

[scaryjim]

So, bit-tech tested a 2GB Gigabyte card that doesn't have a supplementary power connector: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/gra...ce-2x-oc-2gb/1

It's noticably slower than a GTX 950 at medium settings, and was topping out at around 1130MHz due to power target limitations - it looks like it you want to get that last 8% out of the clocks you need to push the power target up and accept that it's going to pull above-spec current from the PCIe slot. Adding the PCIe connector seems to be necessary to get the best out of this card - it's a 90W TDP chip not a 75W...

However, it doesn't look like the 2GB framebuffer holds it back too much.

EDIT: thought: it looks like the Hexus GTX 950 performs a bit slower than the 950 a lot of reviews are using - is that an artefact of using a bus-powered GTX 950? Is it hitting its own power target? Can't help thinking that Hexus and bit-tech have matched their GTX 950/RX 460 the wrong way round

[Tarinder]

I really wanted the 2GB version. One should be coming in soon.

[flearider]

what would be the outcome of a crossfire setup .. ?

[shaithis]

what would be the outcome of a crossfire setup .. ?

Anything from -50% to +100%, depending on the game.....as it's always been.

[jigger]

Anything from -50% to +100%, depending on the game.....as it's always been.

Never seen -50% performance from crossfire. Crossfire seems to give 60-70% performance from 60-70% of games.

[scaryjim]

Never seen -50% performance from crossfire. ...

There have always been games that were so badly optimised that crossfire actually incurred a performance penalty. Perhaps not as much as 50%, but it does happen. Plus with DX12/Vulkan it's up to the developer to build in mGPU support (ordinary crossfire & sli don't work at all, AFAIK). Only way to know if crossfire is going to work for each game is to test it.

In games where crossfire works effectively, a pair for RX 460s will performance roughly like an RX 470. Given the cheapest RX 470 is only ~ £65 more than the cheapest RX 460, crossfire really doesn't make sense for this card...

[jigger]

Yeah I've seen slight performance hits in the odd game but nothing like 50%. 10% maybe.

[[jF]]

What awful, awful value!! Gotta be *mad* to buy this over a cheapo 470 imo....