MSI Radeon RX 470 4GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 CrossFireX Support Graphics Card Radeon RX 470 ARMOR 4G OC

Pros: - Maxes out all of my games @ 1080p easily!

- Overclocked to 1350 core / 1900mhz memory on stock core voltage (+50 on gpu power target)

- with a custom fan curve card doesn't go past 75c in my corsair 540 air while overclocked. fans stay relatively quiet.

- AMD Chill Technology

- Supports 4 displays

- 8 pin power connector

- AMD Relive Software is quite literally amazing. especially their overclocking software "Wattman."

- Hardware Encoder which is basically identical to Nvidia Shadowplay

- Came with Hitman + an Xbox One Wireless Controller FREE!!!

Cons: None.

Overall Review: This is my first ever AMD Graphics Card. coming from the Green team i was always told that AMD GPU's are inferior. their Drivers are horrible and they are slow. Decided to give them a shot anyway and boy was a i surprised! their drivers are actually more stable than of the recent stuff Nvidia has been putting out. Radeon Relive is a breath of fresh air compared to Nvidia Control Panel. Wattman overclocking utility which is built into the relive drivers is really nice! it allows for very fine tuned overclocking which the competition has yet to offer on the driver level. not to mention you can set separate overclock / fan profiles per application. another technology that really sparked my interest was Radeon Chill. its an intelligent power-saving feature for Radeon graphics that dynamically regulates framerate based on your movements’ in-game. During normal gameplay, Radeon Chill works to deliver the full framerate potential of Radeon graphics. As movement decreases (if you go AFK / grab a drink etc), Radeon Chill reduces your gameplay framerate. Designed to save power, lower temperature, and save batteries (for mobile users.)

Conclusion: i'll be sticking with AMD from now on if they keep doing an excellent job with these new cards and drivers. they offer much better price / perf ratio, they have better hardware and way better drivers / software in my own experience.

Pros: -OC'd very easy
-Came with Samsung GDDR5 memory chips
-Cool looking cooler, original thoughts are this should totally be better than reference

Cons: -Despite the cool looking cooler, it was EXTREMELY poorly designed. MSI, please pay attention to the ASUS STRIX series cooling.
-Reference cooling is better than this. There. I said it.

Overall Review: I bought this card to run in a rig at 100% utilization for both core and memory controllers. Because of this, I can test out the extremes of each card and find any flaws associated with them. At first glance, this card is great. I was even to unlock it to 8GB (AHEM, nice try AMD). But after running it long enough I noticed something that everyone seemed to overlook on this model's cooling mechanism. Although it cools the core amazingly (as all coolers should do), the memory chips just have some thermal paste stuck on them and a heatsink. I doubt they really get much air at all.

At 100% load the core on this card runs at an average of 63 deg C yet the memory chips are ABOVE 80 deg C. Currently they're sitting at 82 degrees and I bet they will max out at 83. Not saying that this is harming the chips, as GDDR5 memory chips are rated slightly higher than 80 degrees but FWIW my reference RX480 gets a core temp of 63 deg C and memory temps of 65 deg C. Aftermarket ASUS RX480 core temps at 60 deg C and mem temps at 61 deg C. Fans on the Ref RX480 and this RX470 were both at 100%. The aftermarket ASUS STRIX RX480 was only at 80% fan speed. Draw your own conclusions.

TO ALL THIRD PARTY GFX CARD MFGS: DO NOT ONLY COOL THE CORE (and then half-way cool the memory chips). PAY ATTENTION TO THE GDDR5 CHIPS AS WELL, THEY GET EXTREMELY HOT. ASUS IS THE ONLY ONE DOING A DECENT JOB OF THIS WITH THEIR STRIX SERIES!!!!!

EDIT: Nothing to really change, other than A) the rebate process is ridiculously tedious (and I needed to send away BOTH my UPC from the boxes that I had to cut up, AND my Newegg invoices for these cards) and B) DO NOT TOUCH the heatpipe near the PCI-E power connector if you powered off the computer and attempt to remove it from the rig, it is HOT. I tried to get some leverage to pull the PCI-E power connector from the slot and rested a finger on this without thinking much about it (bad idea, and even worse design; I have ZERO issues with this on the reference design...again reference cards are GOLD).