Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Contents
Let’s check out the Pros and Cons to help me gather my thoughts on this.
Pros
- Tons of ports to fit almost any monitor
- Supports 4 x 4K displays
- FreeSync Support
- Supports DX12
- 0DB Fan mode
- Quick Connect Fan Replacement
- Aluminum Backplate (For Better Cooling)
- NITRO Glow RGB is a nice little toy
- The RGB on the cards seems a little gimmicky, though some people like that. Most manufacturers are on that bandwagon.
- LED BIOS Mode Switch in case you don’t want to install Sapphire TRIXX 3.0.
- Affordable for the speeds provided and headroom
- Sapphire TRIXX 3.0 is a nice Utility
- Dual BIOS support
- Overclocks very well to achieve speeds and performance of the 480 and surely beyond.
Cons
- Does not include any adapters or adapter cables
- Could be important for people that have 2 x DVI Monitors, 3 x HDMI Monitors, 3 x DP monitors, etc…
This card is jammed with performance at a great cost but you can squeeze tons more performance. While it does have a host of different ways to connect your monitor (2 x HDMI, 2 x DP, DVI-D) it does not include additional adapters.
It cannot handle the highest end of games with everything maxed out and give you 60FPS or higher but for a relatively affordable card; it does a good job at what it can do. Since it is more affordable than higher end cards, you could get a 2nd card and crossfire them and get tons more performance. Even for a single card it has plenty of headroom for even more performance.
The card is well priced, but only for about $10 more you can get the 8Gig version and for about $50 more, you can get the Sapphire Radeon NITRO+ RX480. Sapphire is pricing their cards aggressively and the price fluctuates on Amazon often, so its hard to nail down a score based off of pricing.
I am giving this card 5 out of 5 Stars, an Editor’s Choice. It has great performance for being a middle tier card, you can easily get the performance of the next card up, the 480. You can just as easily save for another week or 2 and get the 480 and overclock that. I want to give this card a little less than an Editor’s choice because of the confusion,… but they are doing right by you so if I had a 6th star to give them, I would. AMD and Sapphire and aggressively pushing this GPU and they are doing a great job.
This drives competition among the AMD graphics card partners and I think heats things up on the green team.
I have spent many years in the PC boutique name space as Product Development Engineer for Alienware and later Dell through Alienware’s acquisition and finally Velocity Micro. During these years I spent my time developing new configurations, products and technologies with companies such as AMD, Asus, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA and more. The Arts, Gaming, New & Old technologies drive my interests and passion. Now as my day job, I am an IT Manager but doing reviews on my time and my dime.