Product Photos

 
Meet the Radeon RX 470 in the form of the MSI GAMING X, the card we received is an 8 GB version with a dual-fan heatpipe slash radiator design cooler. It has one PCIe PEG power connector (8-pin). The card has been designed to be a nice match for Full HD gaming, up-to 1080P and perhaps even a 1440P game or two. The PCB is, as mentioned, matte black in color, and of course the new revision TwinFrozr VI cooler is being used. These cards will look just terrific in a dark themed PC. 

These cards are positioned as a great alternative for 1920x1080 / 1920x1200. In our findings the card is faster battling with the GeForce GTX 970, at sub 229 USD for a 'premium' 8 GB version that's not a bad position to be in. Obviously there's more to check out other than performance, we'll have a peek at PCB heat levels and GPU temperatures as well as noise levels.

Our Radeon RX 470 is armed with 8 GB graphics memory which will be clocked at 6.6 Gbps / 256-bit. The reference clocked product will run with clock frequencies up-to 1206 MHz on its 2048 shader processors, this model is however factory tweaked a tiny bit and clocked at 1242 MHz (dynamic boost) in the fastest settings (which we test). The card itself is a dual-slot solution, it is composite heat-pipe based, the GPU is cooled by a nickel-plated copper base plate connected to Super Pipes (8mm heat-pipes) on this MSI GAMING series graphics card. A SU heat-pipe layout increases efficiency by reducing the length of unused heat-pipe and a special SU-form design. Zero Frozr technology eliminates fan noise in low-load situations by stopping the fans when they are not needed. Up-to roughly 60 Degrees C, the fans will not spin. The LEDs embedded in this graphics card can be controlled with the MSI Gaming APP and is RGB configurable with a few animations as well. 
  

This Polaris 10 based product has been designed to be a match for the most popular Full HD resolutions. Actually, it could even do some 1440P gaming quite well also. As you can see, MSI includes two HDMI (2.0b), two DisplayPort 1.4 (HDR ready) connectors as well as one DVI connector. On the reference cards AMD unfortunately stripped away the DVI monitor connector which in the end I feel was an incredibly poor choice. Especially in this price range there are a lot of monitor owners with just a DVI connector.