Sapphire Nitro+ RX 470 OC Graphics Card Overview
This of course is not a reference card so we have a custom design from Sapphire. For their Nitro+ Series they have gone with a simple and elegant design. It looks quite good and should match up with pretty much any motherboard out there. The cooler shroud is all black and has small indentations spread across it, which gives it a pretty cool look.
This card makes use of Sapphire’s new and improved DUAL-X cooling solution, which makes use of two 95 mm dual bearing fans. Sapphire tells us these fans offer an 85% longer lifespan and are 10% quieter than the previous generation. One thing that is great about fans is that they are replaceable, remove a single screw and they come out. They not only allows you to clean them, but if they ever need replaced it is an easy fix.
Taking a look at the card from the side you can see that this is a dual-slot card, which is typical for most cards these day. For those wondering this card has official dimensions of 240(L)X 125(W)X 41 (H)mm which means it should fit in most system pretty easily. You can see two large heatpipes coming out of the side of the card, we will get to that in just a minute. On the opposite side of the card (the one that will face out) there is a Sapphire logo that will light up blue by default, but it is RGB backlit.
Flipping over to the back we have one of my favorite features of this card, the full-length backplate. It has a silver and black design and has both the Sapphire and Nitro logos on it. It not only helps with cooling, but also keeps your card from bending.
Towards the back of the card there is a LED mode switch. This allows you to switch the different LED modes, they include a static color, rainbow switch, and color change by fan speed and PCB temperature. There is also a V BIOS switch on the card as well. There are two profiles on this card, a Silent Mode which sets the GPU boost to 1206 MHz, then there is Boost Mode where the card will run at 1260 MHz. Our card came with Boost Mode enabled by default.
At the far end of the card we have our power connection, which is different from the reference RX 480’s 6-pin PCI-Express power connector. On the Nitro+ RX 470 OC Graphics Card we have an 8-pin PCI-Express power connector which has been used to provide better stability for the factory overclock.
As far as connections on the card go you have two DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0b, and a dual-link DVI. There are a few air vents back there to help out with cooling too.
Taking the cooler shroud and fans off the card we can get a better look at the cooling solution itself. We can see a large aluminum fin stack that extends across almost all of the card. There are actually three (2 larger, 1 smaller) nickel-plated copper heatpipes. This should provide great cooling, even with the factory overclock.
Taking the heatsink off the card we can get a closer look at the Polaris 10 GPU and the rest of our components. This is a custom-designed PCB and Sapphire is making use of Black Diamond Chokes which reduce temperatures by 15% compared to the previous version.