AMD RX470 – ASUS Strix and Sapphire Nitro Review

Test Setup

ASUS RX 470 Strix
Sapphire RX 470 Nitro
Intel i7 6850K
ASUS X99 Strix
Corsair ROG Dominator Platinum 3200
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair LX 512GB OS
Corsair LS 480GB x2 Raid0 Games
Corsair H100i V2
Windows 10

Listed Clock Speeds

ASUS have got a slightly faster GPU than the Sapphire, but the Nitro has 100MHz extra pace on the GDDR5. It will be interesting to see whether the small GPU boost or the big memory boost has the better effect in our results.

ASUS Strix

Sapphire Nitro

Average Clock Speeds  

These are the important numbers to compare because as you will see later in the review the ones above are pretty much meaningless (just like the reference cards were). So the difference between the two averages here is 70MHz which doesn’t sound a lot but as you will see it later it makes a huge difference in the results. Its all link to the temperate target and the power target for the cards, Asus has opted for a 60c target and Sapphire have gone for 75c. Problem is the temperature and the power are linked so by aiming for lower temps Asus are effectively holding back their card and as you can see by the below screenshots it actually makes their ‘overclock’ pointless because the card isn’t being given enough power to actually get anywhere close to it.

Asus 

Sapphire