XFX Radeon RX 470 4GB Black Edition Video Card Review

By Nathan Kirsch

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

XFX Radeon RX 470 4GB Black Edition Video Card

The AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB looks to be a great graphics card for 1080P gaming if you can find one for $179.99 you’ll be able to save yourself a few bucks over the Radeon RX 480 4GB at $199.99. This card blows away the AMD Radeon R9 270 that we used on some of the game titles, so it just goes to show that if you haven’t updated in a few years that you’ll get a massive performance boost in your favorite game titles. The AMD Radeon RX 470 4GB is a card we’d recommend to 1080P gamers and gently recommend to 1440P gamers as the frames per second were starting to get low on many of the more graphics intense game titles. If you are an eSports player that plays CS:GO, DOTA 2 and titles like that you’ll be able to get away with 1440P gaming as most of those game titles aren’t that intensive.

steamvr-rx470

Does VR performance matter to you? Our factory overclocked XFX Radeon RX 470 4GB Black Edition graphics card ended up with an average quality score of 5.8 in the StreamVR Performance Test. This lands it in the VR capable category and not the much desired ready category. AMD did not give the Radeon RX 470 series their VR Premium logo/certification, but did note that it does offer excellent VR performance in some game titles. At the end of the day it really just boils down to what game you are playing, the device being used and of course the image quality settings.

The XFX Radeon RX 470 Black Edition that we looked at today appeared to be a well built card. We like the removable fans, overall look and general quietness of the card. If you are looking for a Radeon RX 470 it is worth a closer look. The only downside to this model and basically all of XFX models is that pricing starts at $199 and goes up to $239. You can get a Radeon RX 480 4GB reference card for $199 and it has better performance and is VR ready. We like the card, but AMD has the pricing all screwed up and that is not XFX’s fault. It looks like AMD was a bit too aggressive with the Radeon RX 480 4GB pricing, but they really wanted to market the VR Ready for $199 deal and that did get them a bunch of attention. We feel the AMD Radeon RX 470 would make more sense at the $159 price point, but that is not how AMD went about the launch.

NVIDIA is likely going to have a GeForce GTX 1050 video card based on their new Pascal GPU really soon and it will be interesting to see what that does for pricing. With Radeon RX 470 4GB pricing in the $199 to $229 range it makes sense for serious gamers to get an entry level Radeon RX 480 4GB for $199 and get better performance.

Legit Bottom Line: The XFX Radeon RX 470 Black Edition is a good choice for a 1080P gaming system, but at $219 it is $40 higher than AMD’s RX 470 4GB SRP and $20 more than a Radeon RX 480 4GB reference card.