SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon RX 460 OC 4GB Review

160W Under Load

I expected better power draw numbers from the card but remember this is a custom graphics card from SAPPHIRE, based on the Radeon RX 460, which is why we have a 6-pin PCIe power connector. The reference design uses less than 75W of power, with all of it coming from the PCIe slot on the motherboard.

AMD's new Polaris architecture comes into play here with the 160W total system power consumption, a full 100W lower than the SAPPHIRE Nitro Radeon RX 470 graphics card. Both the Radeon RX 460 and the faster RX 470 are aimed at 1080p gamers, with the RX 460 just over half the performance of the RX 470, and consumes nearly half as much power.

At just 160W, you could use the Radeon RX 460 in a system with a good 300W power supply, and be absolutely safe in the system not using anywhere near that much power.

Temperature & Noise

Equipped with the Nitro cooler from SAPPHIRE, the graphics card was silent during all of our benchmarking and gaming sessions. The card operated at around 67C with the card on the default fan profile, which is how it should be like as an out of the box experience.