Sapphire Radeon NITRO+ RX 470 4GB OC 11256-01-20G Review

Overclocking Performance, Benchmarks, Temperatures and Power Consumption

Here are the GPU-Z results before and after overclocking.  I wanted to mention, overclocking is not something that takes a few seconds and you are done, it can take hours, maybe even a few days to perfect.

Since the 470 is essentially the 480, with fewer processing cores and in this specific case, less memory, I decided to overclock this card, the same way I overclocked the 480.  You can click here to check out that review as well, it will open up in another tab.  Yeah, as fast as the overclock I placed on the 480, maybe I can save you a few dollars.

We can see the GPU Clock speed increased 161Mhz, and I did not focus too much on RAM, but it did raise 280. I feel like I could have gone higher on both but I did not want to take up too much time on that and delay the review more than it needed.  Other things to notice, only overclocking the GPU Clock and Memory, we raised the Pixel Fill Rate 5.2 GigaPixels, then we raised Texture Fillrate 20.6 Gigatexels and finally we also increased the Bandwidth by 35.8Gigabytes per second.  Sorry for all the numbers, let’s move on.

OK, let’s check out TRIXX’s results.

BEFORE

AFTER

I modified the GPU clock

Then also raised the “Power Limit”

Also the “GPU Voltage”

The “Memory Clock”

And finally the “Current Fan speed”

TRIXX does more than just overclock the card, but I will get into that a little later in the review.  Let’s get into the comparisons.

With that bump in speed, we went from a 3DMarks score of 10,477 to 11,340.  It landed me a 7.91% improvement and I am sure we could have gone even further.  Since I did adjust the power limit and GPU voltage, we did see the average power consumption raise from 347 to 391 on the overclock and the max wattage jumped from 372 to 421, both huge leaps.

Here are also the Run Details, the first one score 76% better than all other results but then the overclock raised that to running better than 81% of the results, a nice improvement.

NITRO 470 OC

NITRO 470 EXTRA OC

3DMark though is not just the complete score, that score derives from the combination of the Graphics score, Physics score and Combined score.  You can see above from the screenshots, but on the stock speeds we went from a Graphics Score of 12,078 to 13,244 on the overclock, a 9.21% improvement.  On the flip side though, the Physics score dropped from 14,805 on the stock scores to 14,710 on the overclock, a 0.64% decrease in performance.  To make it up though we improved performance on the Combined Score from the base speeds providing 4,307 to the overclocked speed of 4,683 a nice 8.36% improvement.  So let’s check out Metro Last Light.

 

1280×1024

The overclock did help a bit, raising the average score from 43.23FPs to 47.66FPS, a 9.74% improvement.  The average wattage drain did jump 7.91% from 243Watts to 263Watts. This was 1280×1024, let’s see what 1920×1080 can do.

1920×1080

While it was a tiny one, there was a 5.35% increase in performance with the overclock though with that performance came an 11.64% increase in power consumption.  Sadly 1920×1080 did not perform much better; hopefully something can come from 2560×1440.

2560×1440

At 2560×1440, we can see the overclock barely brought a 1FPS improvement yet still consume 11.64% power on average.

Metro Last Light as I mentioned is a slayer, we saw it brought a huge improvement in 3DMark, but not so much in Metro.  Will the other games save it?  Let’s check out THIEF.

1280×1024

Starting with 1280×1024 we can see an improvement of 3.46% from a base frames per second of 99.4FPS to 102.9FPS.  With this improvement there was actually no average wattage increase or decrease but on max, there was a 10.92% increase in power consumption but this was on max, so they were surely short bursts of wattage.  A decent improvement though the game already ran great as it was, but let’s check out 1920×1080.

1920×1080

Again we are seeing an improvement of 5.4FPS, though an improvement of 6.56% should not equate to power consumption over base of 13.83%.  This is not the video cards fault though, this is all in the way I overclocked it.  There are plenty of other ways to get to the performance I have shown if not much further using less, this was a quick way to get it. Ok, let’s check out 2560×1440.

2560×1440

5.4FPS improvement over stock clocks yet again, this time though the power consumption went up by 17.16% above stock, higher than before.  With the power, the heat rose as well from 67°C to 70°C, so surely the thermals came from the wattage, but again my overclock was merely an example.  Let’s check out Tomb Raider, hopefully Laura will ease up a bit on the wattage.

1280×1024

Here we are seeing a much better improvement than we saw in THIEF, on average we are seeing a 6.86% increase in performance. Thankfully the temperature also dropped from 76°C to 69°C, a 9.66% decrease in thermals.  How about 1920×1080?

1920×1080

With 1920×1080, we get a 6.1FPS increase in performance and with it a slight increase in power consumption.  On stock clocks it hit an average of 344 Watts and overclocked it hit 377 Watts, an increase of 6.50% but thankfully the change in the fan profile dropped the temperature by 5°C.  Let’s check out 2560×1440.

2560×1440

At 2560×1440, we are getting 66.1FPS, that’s a 7.37% increase over the stock score of 61.4FPS.  Power consumption did go up by 4.61% but thermals improved by 2.82%.

Tomb Raider provided a decent improvement, though it was not really needed since at any resolution and with all the eye candy turned to the max ran perfectly.  Due to the overclock power consumption did go up a little tiny bit.  Let’s see what she does for Ashes of the Singularity.

1280×1024

At 1280×1024, we are seeing a 10.83% improvement in the average framerate.  If you notice as well, since the average frame rate increased, the average CPU frame rate decreased so that we can see that the overcall is helping a bit. Now the bad part is the average power consumption did increase by 6.77% and the cooling has improved by 8.33%.  On to 1920×1080.

1920×1080

On average, there is a tiny 1.1FPS increase yet the decrease of average CPU framerate his been decreased by 6.75% showing that the stress is being placed on the GPU again.  With that, the GPU draws some more power,… well because I let it.  It is now drawing an average of 391Watts when on the stock clock it would only pull 362Watts, the overclock makes it draw an additional 7.71% more power.  On the lighter side, thermals did improve by 2.70%.

Let’s see if 2560×1440 has any sort of real improvement?

2560×1440

At 2560×1440 we get an even smaller 5.07% increase in performance, only 0.9FPS, not even 1.  With that small improvement, the power draw increased by 8.17% but thermals did improve by 4.03%.

It is a pretty cool game, and it plays fine but hurts a little on DX12, surely as the drivers keep getting pumped out the performance will improve.  Well, let’s get over to The Division.

1280×1024

At 1280×1024, we are seeing a 10.27% improvement in the average FPS.  Since the average frame rate increased, the average CPU frame rate decreased 10.17%. Since the GPU uses more power than the GPU, that means the wattage being pulled increased from 366 Watts to 401 Watts, a 9.13% increase… though I wouldn’t mind it too much for such a performance increase.  This is only 1280×1024, let’s see what 1920×1080 can do.

1920×1080

We are seeing only a 4.68% improvement in performance, I would have of course wanted more but it is still incredibly playable.  The average Wattage increase by 13.78%, but surely spending more time on the overclock would have helped power drain much more.  My favorite resolution is next, 2560×1440, well at least that my monitor can handle.

2560×1440

Well, far from playable, but would be perfect on a console, haha.  Even though the results were not great, they did improve by 2.64%. Though with that improvement, it sucked an additional 100Watts, ouch.