KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
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.
Be sure to check out our sponsors store EKWB here
