AMD has scored two solid hits with its initial brace of Polaris 10-based graphics cards, with both RX 470 and RX 480 offering good performance at well-judged price points. These two products essentially allow for console-beating visual quality at 1080p60. The new RX 460 is different - based on the smaller Polaris 11 processor, the idea here is to bring console-level visual power to the entry-level enthusiast market - and indeed gaming notebooks - where the new chip's power efficiency comes to the fore.
However, in assessing the RX 460, we're looking at two high-end iterations of the card - Asus's Strix model, and Sapphire's Nitro edition. Both are exceptionally quiet, and crucially, both of them are equipped with 4GB of GDDR5, meaning that users shouldn't need to skimp on texture quality - and should still be capable of matching PS4's visual quality settings at similar frame-rates. The thing is, both of them cost £30/$30 more than the base £109/$109 price-point, so they really need to be special.
It's still the same Polaris 11 processor inside, of course. This offers 14 fourth generation GCN compute units (there are 16 on the chip, two are disabled) while the reference boost clock is set to 1200MHz. There's a factory overclock in effect on both of these models though, taking them up to 1250MHz. The base RX 460 is powered entirely through the motherboard's PCI Express slot; however, this brace of overclocked editions feature an additional six-pin power input, opening up extra OC potential. It may also explain how both of these cards have a rock solid lock on their boost frequencies no matter what load you subject them to - something we didn't see on the reference RX 480.
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