Hardware Sapphire Radeon RX 470 Nitro OC 4GB Review

Cheapest 8GB RX480 at OcUK? 218.99
Cheapest 8GB RX470 at OcUK? 218.99



But if the price of the 470 wasn't too close to the 480 it would certainly be a very nice budget card.

 

^ This is why I hate GPU pricing structure atm..

 

TBF that 480 looks like it has the stock AMD cooler, which is a bit rubbish by all accounts, whereas the 470 at least has a custom twin-fan cooler and is OC'd out of the box.

That said, it's a nonsense that AMD have two products at essentially the same price point. I don't know what they're playing at really.

 

Is it AMD, or are the stockists painfully aware of the fact that the 470 is almost as good and don't want to be left with stock of 480s nobody wants?

 

Probably a bit of both, GPU stock in general is very poor around the globe right now, Its not just Nvidia or AMD its both of them struggling to keep a product in stock.

People had a good moan at nvidia on the 1080 and 1070 launch but the reality is niether have offered alot of stock to distributors.

OCUK forum is full of people from different places, EVGA rep has said that stock is at a premium as they are simply not getting enough of it yet.

Saphire rep has said the same thing. People also forget prices are before VAT and Store Tax as I call it. Which can easily add 40% to the qouted figures from reps like EVGA and Saphire.

 

Ah, I wasn't suggesting that AMD were setting the prices of all 470s and 480s currently for sale - that's obviously down to the retailers, but as you say there's not a huge amount (either in terms of performance or MRRP) between the 470 and 480, so it's not surprising that we're seeing two products from the same company competing against each other.

Criticism of AMD still stands, though: why produce two products that simply aren't sufficiently differentiated? It's hard enough for AMD to compete with nVidia as it is, so the last thing they need is to launch two products in the space of a couple of months that compete with each other.

 

OCUK have a 4GB 470 for £164.99 in stock

 

TBH I think the pricing is to push people into buying a 480. I know from past experience that sometimes AMD cut down perfectly good higher end products to make cheaper stock. So for example a few years ago I bought a Sempron with one core that easily unlocked and worked perfectly as a Sargas dual core. (Edit. It was Sargas single core and unlocked to Rega? something like that) Something like that. I've also seen many VGA cards unlocked from AMD so they do like leaving in Easter eggs sometimes.

I would imagine they want you to buy a 480. Otherwise there would be a larger gap in performance and a lower price point for the 470.

I don't see any reason to complain about it really. Nvidia do it all the time. At least some people have been able to flash their 4gb cards to 8gb. Gibbo even reckons that the 4gb 470 Nitro may even flash to a fully working 480. Which would make sense, as I said not all of them are failed or dodgy sometimes they're just made as stock with higher end parts.

It's the 460 I am interested in. I don't care about the performance drop I only want it for a third PC I have for Ubuntu. Really hoping they can get it close to the £100 mark. Really don't want to spend anything more than that.

 

If the RX460 beats the GTX950 in performance and doesn't require an extra power connector it will blow my mind. I wouldn't mind if it beat the 750ti without the extra power connector. regardless of price in those scenarios I have a PC a card of that calibre would fit into.

According to PCPartPicker
GTX970 starts at £199 (2nd cheapest at £199.99)
RX480 4GB at £211.04 (only one model on sale?)
RX480 8GB at £215.99 (2nd cheapest at £227.99)
GTX1060 at £229.99 (2nd cheapest at £238.47)

In the span of £30-£40 all those cards lie with virtually nothing separating them. With the 4GB 470 at £164.99, it's looking pretty good value.