ASUS Radeon RX 470 STRIX Gaming 4 GB review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

The Radeon RX 470 are value products. If you are an average gamer with a Full HD monitor and will be able to pick up a 4 GB model for say ~179 USD, then a product like the STRIX is the good stuff. The price stack however is as follows: premium cards will cost $199 and value models $179. So you can expect a 199 USD price for this Red Devil edition card, a price similar to a value 4 GB RX 480, and that might be a problem in the product pricing stack. The performance might be a notch lower compared to the RX 480, but it still is really good. Even at 2560x1440 if you'd forfeit a little in say AA levels, the card can manage itself quite well. With a 120 Watt TDP your power consumption isn't too high either. The board partners improved on everything the reference product did half-half. ASUS delivers the STRIX with a dual-slot cooler that keeps the temps at great levels and brings reasonable silence to the product while gaming. The STRIX is tweaked a bit out of the box as well, however here I have to make a remark. This STRIX downclocks massively when stressed. So while it is aiming to reach 1,270 MHz, realistically we noticed 1,100~1,150 MHz boost frequencies. This is indicative of the power limiter kicking in. Other brands have tweaked that power limiter, ASUS did not. We hope to see another BIOS update as a linear 1,270 MHz is something the card definitely could handle really well. The side effect of throttling is that the product looses like 10% perf compared to say the PowerColor Red Devil, both priced similar. That one however is noisy, this one is reasonably silent.

Performance

Performance wise you always need to place things into perspective, and the final sales price is the biggest variable that will determine the success of the RX 470. For 4 GB if you pick a product in the 179 USD space, I think you'd be golden. But another variable is of course your gaming resolution, and 1080P is the domain for this card. You are looking at a product that competes in-between the GeForce GTX 960 GeForce GTX 970. If you compare to say a 280/280X/280 series graphics card, well, for 199 or 229 USD you are in for a treat in terms of performance and value. Let's not forget about other features; the Radeon RX 470 and Polaris 10 overall will offer proper performance, Eyefinity features and PCIe gen 3 compatibility and all the other stuff like HDMI 2.0b, DisplayPort 1.4 with HDR support and so on. The Radeon RX 470 series is a proper DirectX 12 product right from the get-go and has that little extra bite thanks to an increased number of shader processors. 

Who Would The Radeon RX 470 Be Best Suited For?

As always, the answer to that question is a little complex. I would say that you'll need to look at your monitor and game preferences first and foremost. This card at its given price range makes quite a lot of sense right now for 1080P. It is however capable of rendering 2560x1440 resolution games, but you'll run out of raw performance rather sooner then later. At WQHD (2560x1440) most games run well enough if you forfeit on image quality though, e.g. lower AA and complex texture quality settings and shadows. Another benefit is that at least the most elementary and arbitrary DirectX 12 Feature levels are supported in hardware. Even on very harsh-on-the-GPU titles you'll refrain from un-ticking graphics quality options to gain on framerate performance, there's very little trade-off to be made as the RX 470 will deliver enough. In short, for the money this is an excellent 1080P card... if you opt for that model. With 8 GB we feel the card is rather future proof, however we're not sure the extra money is well invested (worth it) at 1080P.

Cooling & Noise Levels

We did not receive a reference card, but our STRIX  edition from ASUS with the dual-slot two fan cooler did keep the product at roughly 60 Degrees C under load, but it is downclocking. We hope that ASUS is still working on their BIOSes to give it a little extra on the boost frequency. As such it is a bit hard for me to give a final recommendation. Noise levels wise things are okay, not incredibly silent under load, but definitely silent enough. The cooler is at ~40 DBa, so I guess that's OK. We have not had any issues with coil noise for this card.

Power Consumption 

The board is rated at roughly 120 Watts TDP, that means when you completely stress it, that's the power consumption. Our measurements showed that the board TDP is in the 129 Watt region, we measured a little higher but with some games also noticed lower wattage's. The move to 14 nm FiNFET obviously is testimony to a great perf/watt ratio. No complaints here really.

Overclocking

The card in default mode (reference) is running ~1,270 MHz on the boost frequency. Overclocking wise we could get the card stable at 1,350 MHz. The memory will would reach only 7.0 Gbps stable on this card. Overall these are a bit average as even overclocked the card still is downclocking to meet its limiters. So set at 1,270 in fact would mean just over 1,200 MHz in most load scenarios. 

Final Words

The Radeon RX 470 4GB is a very interesting product from a performance point of view versus the money. A premium edition card like the 470 SRIX likely will sit at 189~199 USD. It is still a proper price for this kind of performance and hardware. ASUS  improved on the design with a new cooler, the GPU tweaked (albeit throttling) and give it that ROG feel and design. Also thumbs up for the inclusion of a DVI connector, in fact even two. The big miss is that ASUS did not tweak the power limiter by default as well, and this will keep extra perf compared to what other brands limited. I do think the final shelf product will get another BIOS to compensate that. it's something you can set easily yourself in the drivers BTW, just increase the power limiter to 50% and boom, extra perf is born as the target clock frequency of 1,270 MHz all of the sudden will almost always stay within that or close to that range. Anyone looking for an affordable upgrade to a Full HD and even WQHD capable graphics card coming from say a 280/380... well, this card series will offer nice value for money. Heat and noise wise I'd like to declare the product as okay, the ASUS DirectCU cooler kept the GPU at 60 degrees C which is great, and the noise level remains within specs as well. We think the 470 series will be a nice mainstream product series offering good value for money, but as I always recommend, you need to make sure that you will not purchase the product with price hyper-inflated, 179~199 USD is the purchasing domain that makes sense. We do hope to see ASUS tweak the card a little more in the BIOS so that it will match the 1,270 MHz target better. Overall it is a nice value and recommended product.

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