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Chinese site publishes review of the AMD Radeon RX 470D

by Mark Tyson on 4 November 2016, 10:01

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD), Sapphire

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qadar6

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A Chinese PC technology website has published a full review of an AMD Radeon RX 470D graphics card. This card is not supposed to be sold outside of China according to a report on VideoCardz but it is interesting to look at nevertheless. Looking at what the RX 470D offers and its pricing it is clearly an AMD spoiling tactic against the newly launched Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti.

AMD's Radeon RX 470D sits between the RX460 and RX470 in both pricing and performance terms. The numerals in the name correctly indicate that it sits much closer to the RX 470 in terms of performance, which is good for a GTX 1050 Ti challenger. Looking at the PCOnline benchmarks it is only 5 or 10 per cent slower than the more expensive RX470 in the tested games. That's due to the cut down hardware, the tech details of which is clearly shown in the table below, taken from VideoCardz.

You can immediately see a cut in GPU cores compared to the RX470. However it offsets that deficit somewhat by offering faster GPU boost clock and memory clocks, at least in this Sapphire NITRO example. You might note the TDP increase over the RX470 but apparently the Chinese market won't worry too much about this extra consumption due to the low cost of electricity.

Turning attention again to the benchmarks in the review, this Sapphire RX 470D is a convincing winner over the GTX 1050 Ti in all tested games/apps, which include; Hitman, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ashes of the Singularity, Battlefield 1, Overwatch, The Division and 3DMark Extreme and Time Spy. The RX 470D bests Nvidia's similarly priced rival by as much as 48 per cent in PCOnline's 1080p gaming tests using these games.

Above you can see the Chinese sourced price/perf table, with the GTX 1050 Ti set as 100 per cent. Remember that this Sapphire NITRO RX 470D model might be a bit more expensive than others which could be sold at the exact same price as the standard Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050Ti.



HEXUS Forums :: 6 Comments

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Looking at the boost and clock speeds it looks more like a core cutdown 480 4Gb. 7000Mhz RAM, 1266 boost and 150W are identical. Wonder if this is AMD using failed 480 to fill a gap?
Shame its only available in China. This is exactly the kind of product AMD needs in America and Europe. Something that is price equivalent to the nVidia hardware but dishes out a beating in all tests. That's a way to reclaim market share!
Heh, way to break your new naming scheme within a generation, AMD! Such much for “no suffixes”….

Given that the 470 is already a cut down RX 480, calling this a cut-down RX 480 is a bit redundant. If it's using lower-binned Polaris 10 cores and clocking them quite high it's not surprise to see the power consumption go up; they'll likely need a spot more voltage.

AMD must really be feeling the pinch in the Chinese market if they're doing this to counter the GTX 1050 Ti - although I guess it's a large market and one that they'd have been hoping to make big gains in given the prevalence of MMO/MOBA players over there - it's exactly where Polaris should be taking market-share back, so if they genuinely think the GTX 1050 Ti is going to hurt that effort I can see why they'd push an interim card out. It calls into question the strategy of leaving such a big gap between Polaris 10 and 11 in spec terms…
cheesemp
Looking at the boost and clock speeds it looks more like a core cutdown 480 4Gb. 7000Mhz RAM, 1266 boost and 150W are identical. Wonder if this is AMD using failed 480 to fill a gap?
The regular 470 is a cut-down 480 … You do know that chip binning is done before assembling the graphics card, right? The 480, 470 and 470D are all based on the same chip (Polaris 10), just with (or without) various amounts of CUs disabled. Also, TBP would not carry over if this was the case, as the very process of disabling parts of the chip would lower power consumption.

These are no doubt based on the very worst binnings of Polaris 10 chips, hence the high power requirement despite the low core count. I'd bet the high TBP is to ensure that AIB partners outfit these with coolers good enough to maintain competitive clocks even though they're the most power hungry binnings of P10 out there, as the alternative (lower clocks to preserve power/lower heat) would make this far less attractive. Also, the high memory speed is no doubt to counter Nvidia using the same speed on the 1050 Ti. After all, the regular 470 has no problem outpacing this even with slower memory.
The RX470D has the faster RAM from the RX480 8GB series.

scaryjim
Heh, way to break your new naming scheme within a generation, AMD! Such much for “no suffixes”….

Given that the 470 is already a cut down RX 480, calling this a cut-down RX 480 is a bit redundant. If it's using lower-binned Polaris 10 cores and clocking them quite high it's not surprise to see the power consumption go up; they'll likely need a spot more voltage.

AMD must really be feeling the pinch in the Chinese market if they're doing this to counter the GTX 1050 Ti - although I guess it's a large market and one that they'd have been hoping to make big gains in given the prevalence of MMO/MOBA players over there - it's exactly where Polaris should be taking market-share back, so if they genuinely think the GTX 1050 Ti is going to hurt that effort I can see why they'd push an interim card out. It calls into question the strategy of leaving such a big gap between Polaris 10 and 11 in spec terms…

Its actually 7W less for the RX470D,but if you do some quick calculations it looks like it is within a margin of error. The RX470D is only 6.8% slower for 3% lower power consumption when compared to the RX470 they tested.