Sapphire RX 470 Ni tro+ OC 4GB
www.sapphiretech.com $220
Like Asus’s RX 480, Sapphire’s RX 470 features a host of extras, but here you also get better value and a smaller card. Where the Asus is a triple-fan affair, Sapphire makes do with two, cutting the length to just 242mm and the height to 113mm. And those fans don’t buckle under testing either— they do a perfectly fine job of staying reasonably quiet while keeping the card from roasting.
The fans are also removable and clever venting on the backplate means they help to push heat through the card and to the top of your PC, rather than having it circulate round the bottom—a genuine problem once cards with this style of cooler are installed in a PC. There’s a sturdy metal backplate as well, which, along with a matching fan shroud and RGB backlit Sapphire logo, makes for a very tidy-looking card, even if the pattern on the backplate isn’t quite to our liking.
Like most of the other cards on test, it’s overclocked out the box, with the default RX 470 clocking in at 932MHz, while the Nitro+ version is 1260MHz. That overclocking combined with solid starting performance means this card provides decent bang for buck, sitting comfortably between the GTX 1060 and GTX 1050 in terms of price and performance. 80%