MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G Review

The MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G is a very attractive looking graphics card that targets the mainstream enthusiast gaming audience. We have said it many times in the past, but we do believe that MSI make the best looking graphics cards on the market.

MSI have approached the design of the RX 470 with a focus on low noise performance, and they have suceeded. The RX 470 Gaming X 8G is actually one of the quietest graphics cards we have tested. The large slow spinning fans never exceed 600 rpm when gaming, and they hit around 840 rpm when stressed with the synthetic Furmark test.

Unfortunately for MSI this causes a few issues. Firstly, they cut corners (and costs) by excluding the installation of a backplate. Without a backplate fitted, our thermal imaging camera recorded hotspots close to 100c under load. The Sapphire RX 470 Nitro+ OC by comparison recorded 50.2C at the hottest point on the backplate – around 50c cooler!

We didn't include an overclocking page in this review because we couldn't simply get the MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G overclocked at all without running into artifacting and instability problems. The ‘OC' software profile is the highest stable clock speed we could get, so we aren't sure if this is related to some kind of system glitch, or a more serious issue – as we only have one sample to test.

Right now my biggest issue with the MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G, or in fact any 8GB RX 470 is the pricing. This card is £30 more expensive than the Sapphire RX 480 Nitro+ OC 4GB, which retails for £199.99 inc vat on Overclockers UK HERE. Overclockers UK told us that they are selling out of the Sapphire cards as they get them in and are currently awaiting more stock. At £200 it is the best gaming card on the market right now.

If AMD had forced partners to simply release 4GB RX 470's and 8GB RX 480's then the market would make a lot more sense right now. As it stands we have RX 470's more expensive than faster RX 480's and what makes it worse is that incorporating 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a RX 470 is utterly pointless.

You can buy the MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G from Overclockers UK for £229.99 inc vat HERE.

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Pros:

• looks fantastic.
• dual fan cooler works well.
• no coil whine.
• quiet.

Cons:

• no backplate.
• 8GB of memory is pointless on a RX 470.
• PCB runs close to 100c under load.
• £30 more expensive than some 4GB RX480 models available today.

Kitguru says: The MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8G is a great looking graphics card, that delivers solid performance. Unfortunately at £30 more than 4GB RX480 cards available on the market it is very badly priced. There is no need for 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a lower level RX470 either, because the GPU is long out of horsepower before the extra texture memory would be required.

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