We got our first look at AMD's cut-down Polaris 10 last week with the Radeon RX 470. With 11% fewer cores, a 5% lower operating frequency and an 18% reduction in retentiveness frequency, the functioning striking wasn't nearly as pregnant as we had anticipated. In fact, in our conclusion nosotros called it "almost an RX 480."

Some reviewers have called the Radeon RX 470 pointless because a mere $20 more than buys the 4GB RX 480, but we institute that the 470 could be overclocked to friction match the 480. Additionally, the Asus RX 470 Strix card runs rather cool and quiet while nosotros've nevertheless to see custom RX 480 cards.

Merely nevermind all that... next in line is a Polaris xi role that starts at only $109.

The new Radeon RX 460 is also being unveiled by board partners which means it should exist available immediately. We take the Sapphire Nitro RX 460 OC 4GB on manus for testing, and so let'south discuss what AMD hopes to accomplish with the RX 460 before we get to the benchmarks.

We knew going into this review that Polaris 11 would be much smaller than Polaris x, which is a bit confusing given the naming scheme. Products based on the Polaris xi dice will as well be turning up in ultra-portable devices as the power draw is expected to be very depression and nosotros'll look at that shortly.

On the desktop, AMD hopes to capture the entry level eSports market by providing acceptable 1080p performance in titles such as CS:Go, Dota 2, League of Legends, Overwatch and Rocket League, for instance.

Typically, gamers on a budget take turned to cost effective options such as the GTX 950 and R7 370. Both cost well under $200 with the GTX 950 starting at $160 and the R7 370 at only $150. It's believed that AMD is targeting a similar level of performance for the RX 460 but at an even more attractive cost betoken.

Keeping that in mind and our expectations in check, allow'southward motion on to cheque out this new GPU in greater particular...

Sapphire Nitro RX 460 OC 4GB

Polaris 11 is another GCN fourth generation architecture built using the 14nm procedure. As an itty bitty GPU, yous wouldn't await the graphics carte itself to be very large. AMD's reference card is quite small at just 150mm long, which isn't much longer than the distance from the I/O end of the menu to the back of the PCIe connector, it's a baby-sized graphics carte du jour.

The reference card is coupled with an equally modest cooler so you can safely assume it runs hot and generates a adept bit of racket. This is where our custom unit should excel though to my surprise Sapphire stuffed a surprisingly large graphics card in the box -- ane that looks similar to their RX 470 and RX 480 Nitro models...

Measuring 220mm long, it'south over forty% longer than the AMD reference and given Sapphire'south oversized PCB, the menu stands 122mm tall.

Under the cooler, the RX 460 GPU is connected to 4GB of GDDR5 retention clocked at 1700MHz for a data rate of 7Gbps. Interestingly, the memory interface has been reduced to 128-bit wide which has slashed the bandwidth to just 112GB/south, a 47% reduction from the RX 470 and in fact this is fifty-fifty less bandwidth than the R7 370 has to play with by quite a large margin.

Compared to the R7 370, the RX 460 also has 13% fewer cores, packing 896 SPUs along with 56 TMUs and 16 ROPs. This is a massive 56% cut in cadre configuration over the RX 470, so we are expecting a huge drib in functioning here.

Compared to previous generation AMD GPUs, the saving grace for the RX 460 is that it can operate at upward to one.2GHz and should never drop below one.09GHz when gaming. That's up to a 23% frequency boost over the R7 370 which should help make upward for having 13% less cores.

Sapphire has manufacturing plant "overclocked" its Nitro RX 460 OC 4GB to a heave frequency of 1250MHz, a mere 4% overclock. Only for the purpose of testing nosotros have clocked the card back to 1200MHz for a fair comparison with the residuum of our reference-clocked lineup.

The AMD RX 460 reference card features a single HDMI output, DisplayPort output and dual-link DVI output, and this same configuration is establish on the Sapphire Nitro. At the opposite end nosotros also find a unmarried half-dozen-pivot PCIe ability connector which volition provide this RX 460 graphics carte with more than enough power.