Wednesday, January 18th 2017
Sapphire Launches 1024 SP Version of RX 460 - Full Polaris 11 at 1250 MHz
As TPU has reported before, some versions of AMD's RX 460 graphics cards were able to be unlocked to their full configuration with a simple BIOS update. This raised some questions as to why AMD didn't initially launch the RX 460 as such, increasing their competitiveness against rival NVIDIA's offerings, but now, it seems at least one of AMD's AIB partners has decided to take action in releasing a fully unlocked Polaris 11 GPU.
Marketed as the Sapphire Radeon RX 460 Nitro OC, this is the first officially launched retail version of the full, unlocked Polaris 11 chip, with all of its stream processors unlocked, for a grand total of 1024 SPs against the usual, and much more meager, 896. This brings the card's peak theoretical throughput at 2.56 TFLOPs (versus the base 2.2 TFLOPs on the 896 SP version), while keeping the card's 75 W TDP.Expect this unlocked version of the RX 460 to deliver on average 7% greater performance than its original, 896 SP enabled part, with a pretty negligible increase in power consumption, as our testing shows.There's no word on pricing or availability yet, but these are expected to hit the market around $119 US. Whether or not this one counts as a region-specific launch (much like the Radeon RX 470D which is only available in the APAC [Asia Pacific] region) is yet to be seen.
Marketed as the Sapphire Radeon RX 460 Nitro OC, this is the first officially launched retail version of the full, unlocked Polaris 11 chip, with all of its stream processors unlocked, for a grand total of 1024 SPs against the usual, and much more meager, 896. This brings the card's peak theoretical throughput at 2.56 TFLOPs (versus the base 2.2 TFLOPs on the 896 SP version), while keeping the card's 75 W TDP.Expect this unlocked version of the RX 460 to deliver on average 7% greater performance than its original, 896 SP enabled part, with a pretty negligible increase in power consumption, as our testing shows.There's no word on pricing or availability yet, but these are expected to hit the market around $119 US. Whether or not this one counts as a region-specific launch (much like the Radeon RX 470D which is only available in the APAC [Asia Pacific] region) is yet to be seen.