XFX RX 460 Double Dissipation Review

Bearing AMD’s Baffin GPU, this RX 460 is armed with XFX’s Double Dissipation cooling solution and also benefits from a moderate factory overclock.

Product on Review: RX 460 Double Dissipation
Manufacturer & Sponsor: XFX
Street Price: £125.99 GBP / $134 USD

It’s fair to say that AMD has occupied the low to mid-range of the graphics card market since the new RX series hit the scene in June 2016. The RX 480 has been a particular success story for the brand as they managed to squeeze in a head start over NVIDIA for the next-gen.

In August, AMD unveiled their GCN 1.3 based Baffin GPU by way of the RX 460. This graphics card is touted for 1080p gamers who need an affordable route to DirectX 12 and many weeks on there are a number of custom designs available which offer up their own coolers, factory overclocks and warranties.

Today, we turn to XFX to take a detailed look at their RX 460 Double Dissipation. As its name suggests, this graphics card features a dual-cooling fan design with the added benefit of being able to detach these fans for easy maintenance. XFX has applied a small overclock to the GPU, taking the clock speed from 1200MHz to 1220MHz. Will this help to take on NVIDIA’s GTX 1050?

XFX on their RX 460 Double Dissipation

Optimized for the most popular resolution on the market, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card powers through the latest AAA titles in 1080p. Featuring 4th generation GCN architecture, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card provides exceptional DirectX®12 and Vulkan experiences with native asynchronous shader support.

Technical Specifications

Below are the technical specifications surrounding RX 460 DD Edition, supplied directly from XFX:

GPU
AMD “Baffin” – RX 460
Stream Processors
896
Video Memory
4GB GDDR5
Memory Bus
128-bit
Engine Clock
Base: 1220 MHz
Memory Clock
7 GHz
PCI Express
3.0
Display Outputs
DisplayPort 1.4
HDMI 2.0b
DL-DVI
Recommended Power Supply
400W
DirectX
DirectX 12
OpenGL
4.5
Cooling
Double Fan
Slot Size
Dual Slot
Supported OS
Windows 10 / 8 / 7
Card Length
238mm x 121mm x 40mm
Accessories
User Manual
Driver CD
4-pin to 6-pin Power Cable

Packaging & Bundle

The RX 460 Double Dissipation arrives in a small and nicely designed box which details the fundamental features of the RX 460. Over on the back there is very little else aside from some technical specifications.

Inside, there is a tray which carries the graphics card which sits in a large anti-static bag. Along with the graphics card we also have a number of items which form the bundle, they are as follows:

• AMD Driver CD
• Installation Guide
• 4-pin to 6-pin Cable

Closer Look (With Cooler)

Taking a look at our card we have quite an attractive looking product. Using a stylish gaming aesthetic with red accents removes any query as to whether or not this is an AMD card. This version of XFX’s RX 460 gets the “Double Dissipation” from the twin fan design.

This duo use a 9-blade design and are 90mm in specification. As we’ve seen on plenty of other graphics cards lately, XFX’s RX 460 benefits from a silent mode when the system is in an idle state. So outside of gaming the fans will remain still, and once in-game the fans will begin spinning. This helps to keep noise down to a minimum.

The extra benefit to the configuration which XFX has devised, is that these fans can actually be unclipped from the body of the shroud – making it easy to detach and clean a dusty fan/heatsink.

Flipping the card over, on the reverse we see there is no backplate to protect the PCB which is rather unfortunate but not detrimental to the overall solution. Four screws fix the heatsink to the GPU while an additional two screws fix the extended section of the cooler to the PCB.

A view of the backside of the graphic card reveals how XFX’s cooler extends out beyond the edge of the PCB. This cooler adds on an extra 6.5cm.

Turning to the video out ports on the RX 460 Double Dissipation, we have just three ports to choose from, these are:

• Displayport 1.4
• HDMI 2.0
• Dual-Link DVI

Although in the GTX 1050 camp (the rival to this card) there is no requirement for a power cable from the PSU, with the RX 460 we have a single 6-pin power connector and this card requires a 400W power supply to work effectively.

On the next page we’ll detach the cooler to take a closer look at the components.

Closer Look (Without Cooler)

After removing the six screws which fix the cooler to the PCB, we can take a closer look at the finer details of the heatsink design. XFX use a dual-copper heatpipe configuration which has direct contact with the GPU. These heatpipes branch out to a large aluminium heatsink which pairs up with the cooling fans to eradicate as much heat as possible.

Without the cooler we can see the PCB and components in all their glory. Taking the heatsink out of the equation reveals just how small the PCB is, the length of the PCB is only 16.5cm.

At the very heart of RX 460 Double Dissipation is the AMD Baffin GPU which is based on a 14nm processor with 3 million transistors and is based on GCN 1.3 architecture.

Against the reference RX 460, this XFX card features a 220MHz overclock to the GPU – reference sits at 1200MHz, this card operates at 1220MHz. This should present us with a slight boost in performance.

The basis for RX 460 is that it will satisfy 1080p gamers who are on a tight budget. Over the series of forthcoming pages, we’ll be testing out the RX 460 to see how it compares to the GTX 1050 in popular games at 1080p and 1440p (for a slight challenge!).

Test Setup & Methodology

How we test graphics cards

Testing a graphics card is an extremely lengthy process. We sometimes see reviews where a graphics card has been tested using out of date equipment, out of date games and even out of date drivers. While the latter can be excused due to the sheer amount of driver updates making a thorough review impossible we will however notify the reader when we have used a different driver to the normal for example a pre-release driver. For the most part however we will always use the same hardware and latest drivers so this does certainly need to be taken into consideration when viewing our testing results. Each game and benchmark is tested times with the lowest and highest scores omitted out of the 5 results and the average then taken from the three remaining to give us our final result for each resolution and setting used.

Hardware

Taking Intel’s High-End Desktop platform, our hardware utilises the Intel X99 chipset. Combined with this we use the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor clocked to a realistic and achievable 4GHz to ensure we have no CPU bottlenecks. With 16GB (4x4GB) of DDR4 at 2666MHz and a 750GB SSD there should be minimal paging so the benchmarks we run today will hopefully give a true reflection of the graphics card’s performance.

High End Graphics Cards on test:
ZOTAC GTX 1050 MINI (NVIDIA 375.57)
XFX RX 460 DD Edition (Crimson 16.9.2)

Special thanks go to Intel, Corsair, MSI and AOC for providing the extreme spec components used for our test bench:

Motherboard: MSI X99S GAMING 9 AC
CPU: Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition @ 4GHz
RAM – 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair LPX Vengeance (Red) DDR3 @ 2666MHz 16-17-17-35 C1
Power Supply – CORSAIR HX1050
Hard Drive – Samsung 840 EVO 750GB
Cooler – CORSAIR Hydro Series™ H105 240mm Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler
Monitor – AOC 28″ 4K U2879VF
Capture Card – Razer Ripjaw

Benchmarks
If you are a regular reader of our reviews you will know we like to test the latest hardware with the latest games and benchmarks on the market. Here are the games we’ve chosen:

DOOM (OpenGL 4.5 & Vulkan)
Total War: Warhammer
Rise of the Tomb Raider
HITMAN
DiRT Rally

To capture framerates we use a combination of in-game benchmark tools, FRAPS and PresentMon.

We also take into consideration the benchmarkers out there so have included three of the more popular synthetic benchmarks available:

Unigine: Valley
Unigine: Heaven 4
Futuremark 3DMark Firestrike
Futuremark 3DMark Time Spy

Let’s see how today’s graphics card performed…

Power, Temperatures, Acoustics

To test for power consumption, we take a measurement from the plug socket. It is important to note that the figures below represent total system power use and not just the GPU. The CPU was always in a fixed state (4GHz overclock) so did not affect the additional power load when the GPU was placed under 100% load using Heaven 4.0 which was ran for 20 minutes at which point a load reading was taken. Idle readings were taken 5 minutes after system boot to ensure any background services and applications had loaded.

Temperature

To test temperatures we measured idle temperatures after booting windows, letting all applications finish loading and ran a few benchmarks. Once the benchmarks were complete we left the card to reach a cooling plateau where we then took the idle temperatures. For the load tests we set Heaven 4.0 running continuously for ~30 minutes recorded the peak/maximum GPU temperature.

Acoustics

The noise from the cooling fans is noticeable once the card is fully loaded. While the sound may not be overbearing, it is recognisable if your case is sat on the desk and you have thinner panels.

DX12: 3DMark Time Spy

With its pure DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, 3DMark Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.

DX11: 3DMark FireStrike

Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for high-performance gaming PCs. It is Futuremark’s most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today.

DX11: Unigine Heaven 4.0

Heaven Benchmark with its current version 4.0 is a GPU-intensive benchmark that hammers graphics cards to the limits. This powerful tool can be effectively used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions, as well as check the cooling system’s potential under maximum heat output. It provides completely unbiased results and generates true in-game rendering workloads across all platforms.

DX11: Unigine Valley

Valley Benchmark is a new GPU stress-testing tool from the developers of the very popular and highly acclaimed Heaven Benchmark. The forest-covered valley surrounded by vast mountains amazes with its scale from a bird’s-eye view and is extremely detailed down to every leaf and flower petal. This non-synthetic benchmark powered by the state-of-the art UNIGINE Engine showcases a comprehensive set of cutting-edge graphics technologies with a dynamic environment and fully interactive modes available to the end user.

DX12: DOOM OpenGL 4.5

By default DOOM utilises an OpenGL 4.5 renderer, and is one of relatively few Windows PC titles to not use DirectX 12. It tests how well NVIDIA and AMD’s GPUs deal with a less mainstream approach, especially in regards to driver optimisations, and like all of id titles stretches graphics quality to the limit.

DX12: DOOM Vulkan

id have also released an optional Vulkan rendering path for DOOM. This API is a development of AMD’s Mantle low level which has been taken on board by the Kronos Group for implementation as the next generation of Open graphics APIs. Like DirectX 12 Vulkan is capable of Asynchronous Compute in specific configurations.

DX12: Total War: WARHAMMER

Total War: WARHAMMER is a pseudo Real-Time Strategy title which leverages DirectX 12 to render huge numbers of complex units on screen at any one time.

DX12: Rise of the Tomb Raider

Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider is the sequel to 2013’s Tomb Raider reboot. An enormously challenging title graphically, the developers also released an optional DirectX 12 render path for Windows 10 users. Although it has undergone a number of iterations this rendering pathway notably doesn’t currently utilise the full capabilities of DirectX 12.

DX12: HITMAN

Yet another DirectX 12 title, 2016’s Hitman from Square Enix and developer IO Interactive has a more robust DirectX 12 implementation than Rise of the Tomb Raider. We’ve tested at a full range of resultions, from 1080p through to 4K, which provides a look at the impact of GPU speed and memory utilisation.

DX11: DiRT Rally

Overall Performance

Here we take a look at the overall performance of the graphics card. This figure is determined by finding the average FPS across all of the settings used in a particular benchmark(game) to give us an overall value.

Value For Money

We make a simple calculation for this set of results. For each game we add all of the resulting FPS totals together and then divide by the four sets to give us an overall performance figure. While the figures alone do not give you an accurate picture of how the card will perform in any given scenario, they do tell you, when averaged, which GPU is the more capable across all of the benchmarks and settings tested.

Conclusion

AMD’s new lineup of RX graphics cards has supplied the entry level and mid-range market with some interesting solutions. While the RX 480 and GTX 1060 have remained significant rivals, the RX 460 and GTX 1050 are the two competing graphics cards at the low-end.

As is quite clearly the case on the subsequent pages, the RX 460 does indeed lag behind the GTX 1050 in some gaming titles but it also manages to gain a victory here and there too. The important thing to bear in mind is that this XFX RX 460 DD Edition features an overclock, while the ZOTAC GTX 1050 MINI is a stock/reference design. Couple this with the fact the RX 460 is slightly more expensive and it becomes a difficult option to go with.

Some of the strong features that the XFX RX 460 DD edition does arrive with are the detachable cooling fans which is a novel idea because after prolonged periods of time dust build up can become a problem on the fans and heatsink, and this allows you to easily get in and get things sparkly again. We also like the fact this card’s fans cease to spin if the system is idle or performing low-level tasks – this certainly helps to keep the noise down.

While XFX’s cooler is an effective solution we have to question the size this heatsink and cooling fans add to the overall dimensions of the graphics card. Especially when adding in an extra fan is probably unnecessary – a larger, single fan would serve the purpose just as well. Having the extra fan adds in additional noise and for an entry level graphics card, often the benefit of choosing a product which is at the low-end means a smaller footprint which can fit into a smaller chassis.

The XFX RX 460 Double Dissipation arrives with a price-tag of £125.99, which is the same realm as the GTX 1050 we tested next to this AMD graphics card. At this cost, we’d have expected a heavier factory overclock to remain more competitive, which would in turn rival the NVIDIA card’s performance figures. One thing we are pleased to see if that XFX do offer an extended warranty of 3-years!

XFX’s RX 460 Double Dissipation is an attractive looking card which can handle 1080p gaming. Though the cooler is a good performer, the size and dual-fan is somewhat overkill on this entry level solution.

Pros
+ Good styling
+ Detachable fans
+ Low-noise during idle periods
+ Good cooler
+ Reasonable 1080p performance
+ DirectX 12 ready
+ 3-year warranty

Cons
– Should be cheaper to remain competitive
– No backplate
– Unnecessarily large
– Two fans not needed

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