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

TRIXX Overclocking and Card Utility

For the overclocks, there are quite a few applications to work with but I am reviewing a Sapphire card and since they make the card, I figured it was best to use TRIXX.  TRIXX aside from being Sapphire’s overclocking software it is also used for a few other things of which I will go over here.

I have shown you a bit before, but again I will go over it since this section is just going over TRIXX.  Before I show you how to overclock, I will give you some recommendations on how to overclock, and let’s start with the GPU.  Please note, these are only recommendations and not rules, you will want to find your own overclock and also, my overclock my potentially not work on your card or your overclock my blow mine away, not all GPU’s are the same.  One other thing to mention, as drivers get released and refined, overclocks could perform even better, or maybe even worse… it happens.

This section here goes over how many Mhz the GPU is running it also shows you the temperature of the GPU.  The default GPU clock is 1260Mhz and the temperature at least here is at 31.0°C.  The way I recommend overclocking is 5Mhz at a time and you can raise the GPU speed clock by click the + on the “GPU Clock” or – to lower the GPU Clock.  I recommend writing each change down to backtrack in case you go too high.

When you get the results, write it down as I mentioned and then click “Apply”

If during your testing the machine freezes or you notice artifacting or tearing (spots appearing on the screen, missing or stuck textures) then it’s time to raise the “Power Limit” bar and if that fails then also raise the GPU Voltage and test again.  Make sure all changes you make, you click “Apply” and you write it down.

You will need to play with the Power Limit and GPU Voltage a bit.  My overclocks consumed a lot of power because I raised these a bit to quickly compensate, but since you will now own this card, you will want to use these power settings only when needed.

As you are raising the GPU Clock, you will also want to work on the Fan Speed.  I would recommend clicking “Custom”, which will open up the “Custom Fan Speed” section where you can raise/lower the fan bar.  As you raise the clock speeds, power limit and GPU voltages the card will get hotter.

Once you have reached a stable GPU speed and achieved adequate cooling then I recommend you start working the same process on the Memory Clock.

I would recommend saving your work too, you can do this on the profiles.

You can click on any one of those numbers and click “Save” the settings.

You will want to use the same methods for Memory Clock that I mentioned for GPU Clock.

Here you will raise the “Memory Clock” slider.

And like before, click “Apply” to apply the settings.

This is what I came up with; let me know what you got?

One thing to mention about overclocking on Sapphires TRIXX 3.0.  If/When you restart your computer for any reason, at times the “GPU Voltage”, if you saved it will appear to be “0” (zero)
as well the “Power Limit” setting sometimes maybe just slightly lower than where you last left it, even if it came from a save profile. I am assuming this is occurring since it is a beta.

Aside from the ability to overclock, TRIXX gives you a few more features, I will list them here.

FanCheck:  A utility built into Sapphires TRIXX 3.0 that allows you to check the life of your fans, since you are actually able to easily replace these fans.

This will run a test on each fan on the card.

Now if everything is working fine, this is what you will see.

Problem is that I was not the first recipient of this card, it has already passed through the hands of a few reviewers before it got to me and who knows how rough they were on the card, so I got this message.

I ran it a few times and each time this message would appear.  It worked fine throughout the entire review and I was able to give you the previous screenshots and towards the end I got this message.  With this I have to mention, since this has passed through a few hands before it got to me, the chances of this happening are relatively high, the chances are slim to none if this was a new card.  This can happen with any card from any manufacturer though but Sapphire came up with the Quick Connect System, so this is a great opportunity to see how this works out.

With the Quick Connect System, you don’t have to send your card back if the fans are failing, they will send you new fans and you can replace them without having to wait for the RMA process.

So when you get this message, just clicking anywhere within that message brings you to this page.

Here you can signed up for an account or login if you already have one to fill.

Then click “Add New Ticket”

Fill out all the info and then click “Create This Ticket”.   Remember, the registration card has the serial number on it, so you don’t have to play with the card to get it, so don’t through the card away.

That was a great way to not only show the feature, and how to handle it.

So now, back to the rest of TRIXX until I receive the replacement fan or fans.  Once I receive it or them I will make a video (through the power of time travel, the video will be included here too).

So a few more of the features of this software is the “Settings” button itself.

Settings allows you to show effect memory clock, Synchronize crossfire cards, set clock on Change, save fan settings with profile, Disable ULPS (ULPS: Ultra Low Power State: a sleep state that lowers the frequencies and voltages of primary and non-primary cards to save power, it can also cause instabilities with Crossfire and single card configurations).   The other settings are to be able to “Load on Windows Startup”, start TRIXX minimized and restore clocks,… maybe I should enable that one?

There is also “Graphics Card Info” which shows you information on the card.  Most of the information is static information, of course if anything did change it would update, for example when I overclocked, it showed the clock speeds.

Here are the stock settings:

Here are the overclocked settings:

This also allows you to “Save the BIOS” to maybe store for your own purposes, give to a friend or share with the community or maybe adjust using another piece of software and reflash back to the card.

Hardware Monitor, allows you to see all of the specs of the card in real life, as you are overclocking and maybe running through games and benchmarks. Here you can see where the voltages are maybe if the benchmark fails, then make adjustments or if maybe the voltages are needlessly high, you can adjust looking through here as well.

And “Log Now” allows you to create a log to save your metrics to of your Sensors.  Its output is similar to that of GPU-Z.

Then, last but not least on the TRIXX side is how to control the lighting.

Sapphire TRIXX 3.0 also gives you a nice feature called NITRO Glow.

Nitro Glow allows you to change the LED lights on your card.  It’s pretty cool actually, but both of these don’t really say much unless you actually see them work, so I recorded a video for you.  Check it out.

So that’s about it for TRIXX, pretty nice right?

One more thing I wanted to show you using the Seek Compact Thermal Sensor that I will be reviewing soon was how thermals build up while benchmarking.  The Seek Compact Thermal Sensor is a device that hooks up to your Android or IOS smartphone and shows you in video or in photo’s thermal imaging of whatever it is aiming at.  Check it out.

This is the top of the card sitting idle.  See how the hottest spot on the card, the top of the PCB behind the GPU is at 39°C.

Underneath we can see the fans sitting idle,… since it has not hit the thermal threshold.

This is after only 2 minutes of benchmarking using UNIGINE’s Valley Benchmark.

Sapphire did a very nice job keeping this card cool and quiet too with its Zero DB technology and its cooling system.

Oh and, now that I got to show you have well the fans work and its cooling, I also get to show you how the fans get replaced in the event one or both of yours fail.

Pretty simple right, one single screw to replace an entire fan unit, two screws of course if you are replacing both.

Almost a 1,549 RPM difference from the prior test to when the fans were replaced, that’s awesome.

Let’s see what I thought by clicking to go to my Final Thoughts and Conclusion.