Sapphire also tweaked the RX 480’s connectivity.
A sexy metal backplate on the rear of the card-which you don’t often see on mainstream graphics cards-makes it even more attractive. It’s a refreshing change from the aggressive, angular, overly large (and borderline garish) designs deployed by many graphics cards these days. Speaking of the aesthetics, the Nitro+ RX 480’s pockmarked dark shroud looks absolutely sleek and gorgeous despite being hard plastic.
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By default, the card glows Sapphire blue, but Trixx 3.0-which will be “available soon,” so I didn’t have a chance to test it-allows you to set custom colors, tie the hue to various use states, or even shut it off completely.Īlternatively, pressing the LED button on the top of the card cycles through the options below, no additional software required. Trixx 3.0 also powers Nitro Glow, Sapphire’s branding for the multicolored RGB lights embedded throughout the Nitro+ RX 480. Yay to eliminating life’s little hassles! Brad Chacos And if problems do come up, Trixx will connect you with Sapphire’s customer service, which will send you a fan replacement rather than requiring you to send your entire card back for repair. What’s more, a new Fan Check function in Sapphire’s Trixx 3.0 software monitors your fan for issues and waves when problems come up. They’re held on by a single screw, and you don’t need to rip apart the whole shroud to yank them all. It’s easier to service and replace the Nitro+ RX 480’s fans, too. The fans actually won’t spin at all until the GPU temperature hits 52 degrees Celsius, making the card completely silent when you aren’t gaming or rendering videos. Sapphire claims the redesign results in a 10-percent noise reduction compared to the previous generation of Dual-X coolers. The Nitro+ RX 480’s fans have been upgraded to 95mm, dual ball-bearing models. The card features Sapphire’s Dual-X cooling solution, a pair of fans over a beefy, high-density heat sink riddled with copper heat pipes of various sizes. Sapphire’s supremely powerful, yet whisper-quiet custom coolers never fail to impress when I lay my hands on a Nitro card, and the Nitro+ RX 480 is no exception. The Nitro+ RX 480 features Sapphire’s superb Dual-X cooling solution, with easily removable fans. Sapphire says the new chokes reduce coil temperatures by an additional 15 percent compared to the ones found in previous Nitro cards. The Nitro+ also features a new version of Sapphire’s black diamond chokes, which help to filter and clean up the card’s electrical signals. Second, Sapphire redesigned the power system on the Nitro+ RX 480, swapping out the reference model’s 6-pin power connector for a beefier 8-pin and altering the power phase design so that no more than roughly 60 watts courses in via your motherboard’s PCI-E slot. And Sapphire spent time tweaking the Nitro+ RX 480’s settings so that the card stays right near that maximum clock speed damned near 100 percent of the time that you’re playing games. Reference cards capable of hitting 1,330MHz-a mere 5-percent boost-appear to be a slim minority.
That said, the 1,342MHz boost clock on the 8GB Nitro+ RX 480 is higher than the overclocks squeaked out of many early RX 480 reference models. Some Internet commenters were hoping for 1,400MHz clock speeds from custom RX 480 variants, which clearly didn’t happen here (or on any of the other custom RX 480s announced thus far).
The default Boost mode comes enabled out of the box, hitting a modest 1,306MHz on the 4GB Nitro+ RX 480 and 1,342MHz on the 8GB version. The optional Quiet mode actually sticks to the same 1,266MHz boost clock as the reference RX 480. Both ship with a dual BIOS featuring both “Quiet” and “Boost” modes. The core clock speeds for the two models also differ. The VRAM inside the 8GB model comes clocked at 2,000MHz, while the 4GB model runs at 1,750MHz. The differences between the two extend beyond mere memory capacity, however. The Nitro+ RX 480 ships in two configurations: A 4GB (which we’ll be reviewing) and an 8GB model, both with a 256-bit memory bus.
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