On launch day, we got a chance to share with everyone our review of the Sapphire Nitro RX 460 graphics card. Utilizing the new Polaris 11 GPU from AMD, the card featured one of the higher factory overclocks. That of course, comes with higher prices, something that Sapphire will rectify with a more budget oriented card. This is where the new Sapphire RX 460 2G OC comes in.
“For online gamers playing most popular titles such asCounter-Strike: Global Offensive, League of Legends orOverwatch SAPPHIRE Technology introduces the new inexpensive SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon™ RX 460graphics card. Featuring the latest power-efficient Polaris chip and making no compromises in cooling, the new budget king of the Radeon rebellion is an affordable upgrade to latest graphics technology.”
While still featuring the same dual fans as the Nitro variant, the standard RX 460 utilizes a simpler Dual-X cooler that hearkens back to earlier Sapphire graphics cards. The fans themselves are the same 95mm ones featured on the Nitro. The fin array does look a bit smaller compared to the Nitro. More notably, the card features just 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM but that should still be more than sufficient for more usage scenarios. The factory overclock is just 10Mhz lower at 1210 Mhz which probably won’t matter much if at all.
“Designed to perform great in massively popular online titles, the SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon™ RX 460 promises minimum input lag and over 100 frames per second in Dota 2 or Rocket League in 1080p. Performance up to 30% better than R7 260X is the result of factory-overclocked 4th generation GCN core. The card features 896 stream processorswith a boost clock up to 1210 MHz as well as 2 GB of GDDR5 video memory on 128-bit interface and clocked at 1750 MHz (7 Gbps effective speed).”
At $119, the card is $20 cheaper than the Nitro which will appeal to the budget users the RX 460 is mostly targeting. Honestly, I quite like the look of the DUAL-X cooler I hope that Sapphire will release more cards with this cooler as an option as well.
