Sapphire RX 480 Nitro OC+ Review

Sapphire RX 480 Nitro OC+ Review

Introduction

The RX 480 has surprised us all, to a certain degree, with its combination of performance and attractive pricing. We’ve seen how close it gets to the GTX 1060, how well it overclocks, and even how it can match a GTX 1080 in CrossfireX. 

Recently we saw the Sapphire Nitro RX 470, a card which looked fantastic and performed very well. Today’s review is also a model in the Sapphire Nitro range but it’s their full-on, hardcore, highly overclocked RX 480 Nitro OC+.

If you want all the performance benefits from overclocking your Polaris equipped graphics card, but aren’t the type of person to want to risk your hard earned wedge fiddling with power targets and voltage offsets, then the Sapphire Nitro OC+ could be just the ticket.

Let’s find out how it matches up to the competition.

Technical Specifications

Probably the biggest challenger to the Nitro OC+ is the ASUS Strix, and when you look through the specifications they’re certainly closely matched. The Strix ran out to 1330 MHz, but the Nitro OC+ raises the bar still higher to 1342 MHz. That might not seem like a massive leap forwards, but remember that even manually overclocking the cards we could only gain 54 MHz above standard. The RX 480 is just as fast as it can go when AMD release it, so to squeeze 76 MHz out of it as Sapphire have done is worthy of an appreciative nod.

GPU: Polaris RX 480
Stream Processors: 2304
Compute Cores: 36
Core Speed: 1208 MHz
Boost Speed: 1342 MHz
Memory Speed: 8000 MHz
Memory capacity: 8192MB GDDR5
Memory interface: 256-Bit
Power: 1x 8-pin 175W TDP
Display Outputs: 2x HDMI, 2x DisplayPort, 1x DVI
Warranty: 3 year