With lower end cards, it’s quite common to eventually see single slot cards come out. Due to their lower cooling and power requirements, the single slot profile is chosen to allow for HTPC or SFF systems to benefit from a dGPU. When the RX 460 first launched, AMD touted its capabilities as an HTPC and SFF card. First out of the gate was HIS with their RX 460 Slim-iCooler OC models. This week, its XFX turn to release their RX 460 Core Edition OC single slot graphics card.
The card comes in both the 2GB and 4GB configurations with the GPU core clock at 1090 MHz base and 1220 MHz boost. This is a minor 20 MHz factory overclock on the boost clock speed. It is based on the Polaris 11 GPU with 896 shaders, 48 TMUs and 16 ROPs. The shroud itself is black with fat red stripe and white XFX logo. Cooling is provided by the single 70 mm fan and aluminum channel heatsink. While it’s not quite as quiet as the passive XFX model, it for sure smaller and sleeker. Display outputs consist of one each of dual-link DVI, HDMI 2.0b, and DisplayPort 1.4. Due to its slim characteristics, it would be a prime candidate for liquid cooling but that really isn’t necessary for the RX 460.
For the eagle-eyed readers among you, one thing that pops out is the close similarity between the HIS and XFX single slot RX 460s. Both feature the same cooler shroud, fan configuration and even the attachment tabs between the shroud and the heatsink. This suggests that at the very least both companies are sourcing their coolers from the same supplier, if not sharing even more. It would be quite interesting to strip the two cards down for a comparison and pit them one against the other to see which one comes out ahead.
