Every AMD Radeon RX 470 you can buy: A cheat sheet

Today, AMD’s affordable new Radeon RX 470 graphics card launched with a confusing pile of customized partner designs. Which one is right for you? We’ve rounded them all the available RX 470s and sorted them by price, complete with the key unique selling points of each. 

Want to hear what we thought of AMD’s second Polaris-based GPU? Check out PCWorld’s XFX Radeon RX 470 review for the full low-down and a bucketload of performance charts. If you can’t lay hands on a 4GB RX 480, this is a great graphics card—but pricing and configurations vary wildly.

Editor’s note: This article originally published on 8/4/16 but was updated on 8/7/16 with additional pricing info.

Before we dive too deeply into customized versions, here are AMD’s reference specs for the Radeon RX 470.

The cheapest RX 470 on the market is PowerColor’s Red Devil Radeon RX 470 4GB, which actually retails for AMD’s suggested price of $179 on Newegg. Editor’s note: The price of PowerColor’s card was increased to $199 shortly after publication.

This graphics card integrates a pair of open air fans with a decent heatsink, a metal back plate, a dual BIOS switch, and an overclock to 1270MHz (compared to the stock RX 470’s 1206MHz boost clock). For a card that’s likely to perform roughly equal to or just behind the 4GB version of the RX 480, PowerColor’s RX 470 looks like a stellar option. On paper, it’s easily the best value in this roundup.

Next up is Sapphire’s Radeon RX 470 4GD5, which isn’t actually on the market yet. But we assume that it will land right around AMD’s $179 suggested MSRP because it only uses a very slightly modified version of AMD’s RX 470 reference design, with a very mild 1216MHz overclock. Editor’s note: This card appeared a day later with a $199 price point on Newegg.

Despite the general boringness of a mostly reference model, that silver lettering and face plate look damned attractive.

Moving up a bit in price, there’s the Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 470 4GB ($189 on Newegg). This custom RX 470 has been slightly overclocked to 1226MHz and offers a more conventional I/O layout with a pair of single-link DVI connectors, an HDMI port, and a DisplayPort.

Asus’s Aura RGB lighting comes included on this board for all you LED lovers out there. With a large pair of fans and Asus’s STRIX cooler, there should be no doubt that this graphics card will have both thermal and acoustical performance on lock.

The competition gets a lot stiffer at the $199 price point, with a three-way faceoff between Gigabyte, Asus, and MSI. But there’s a clear winner on paper.

MSI’s Radeon RX 470 Gaming X 4G ($199 on Newegg) offers a beefier cooler, eight-pin power connector, and the ability to literally shut its fans off when you aren’t gaming. MSI’s RX 470 also comes with a decent 1254MHz overclock and a red LED theme.

With all that said, Gigabyte’s Radeon RX 470 G1 Gaming ($199 on Newegg) is still a strong offering. It too sports a mild overclock (to 1230MHz), a metal back plate, and a decent looking dual fan cooling solution. Outside of those features it’s a rather unremarkable design though. If it was $20 cheaper it would be an excellent choice but at $199 there are better options available.

Finally, we have Asus’s ROG Strix Radeon RX 470 OC model ($199 on Newegg), which turns clock speeds up a notch to 1270MHz. Outside of the heftier overclock it appears to be exactly the same as the $189 non-OC version. On the other hand, Asus’s Strix design is pretty good, and $10 for an extra 50MHz isn’t a bad deal.

Moving up to the $209 price point brings two options. Of the two, we lean towards Sapphire’s Nitro+ Radeon RX 470 ($209 on Newegg) as the better choice.

Sapphire’s updated Nitro+ design (which we tested on an RX 480) offers two massive fans, a solid heatsink, a customizable LED logo, and the outright beautiful Nitro-branded back plate. Sapphire also uses a custom PCB two offer a rear-facing eight-pin power connector. All of these features combined with a 1260MHz overclock and 7GHz memory overclock (compared to the RX 470’s stock 6.6GHz memory) lead to a well-rounded offering from Sapphire.

XFX’s Radeon RX 470 RS Triple X 4G also costs $209 on Newegg. It’s rather similar to Sapphire’s offering in that it has a back plate, two easily swappable fans that go idle when you’re not gaming, and the same I/O layout. But it sets itself apart with a chunkier cooler and the use of only a single six-pin power connector. It’s a solid design but it falls slightly short of the competition due to its very minor 1226MHz overclock.

XFX’s second model is the Radeon RX 470 RS Black Edition True OC ($219 on Newegg), the subject of PCWorld’s own Radeon RX 470 review. It boasts an overclock to 1256MHz, which seems less impressive given the price point and what the competition is offering. That said, XFX’s high-quality card features a superb build design. Outside of that overclock, this model is exactly the same as the $10 cheaper model.

Rounding out the top end of the Radeon RX 470’s product stack is an 8GB version of Sapphire’s Nitro+ Radeon RX 470 design. It comes with a 1260MHz core overclock and 8GHz memory overclock, so this graphics card has the fastest and the largest memory system of any RX 470 on the market.

But it also costs $239 on Newegg, which is borderline silly for an RX 470 and a full 33 percent more than the RX 470’s MSRP of $179. For that price you might as well just buy an 8GB RX 480.