Returning readers will know that seeing two similar cards pop up means just one thing… Crossfire benchmarking! After I finished up my review of the Sapphire RX 470, I stayed up all night benchmarking the two cards together. I wanted to take a look and find out if picking up two RX 470’s would be better than a single GTX 1070, something that falls into the same price range. In addition, I was curious if we would just see an improvement in the 1080p resolution that these cards were designed for or if maybe they would be more viable for 1440p as well when paired up. As always with our SLI and Crossfire testing. I skip all of the normal review stuff and frankly don’t write to much, leaving you guys with a whole pile of graphs and performance numbers to sort through. So enjoy!

Product Names: Sapphire RX 470 4GB Nitro and XFX RX 470 RS Black Edition

Review Samples Provided by: Sapphire and XFX

Written by: Wes

Testing by: Wes

Amazon Links: Sapphire RX 470 4GB Nitro and XFX RX 470 RS Black Edition

Links to our original reviews

Sapphire RX 470 4GB Nitro

XFX RX 470 RS Black Edition

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Benchmarks

Like our previous coverage of two GTX 1070’s in SLI, I do want to point out that I only include graphs for benchmarks that show an actual performance increase when running in Crossfire. I do this because we use these same graphs for our single card reviews and I wouldn’t want anyone getting confused when they see an RX 460 outperforming two 470’s in Crossfire or similar. Here is the breakdown on what we normally test but I didn’t include in here. For starters, all of the Compute testing isn’t included because Crossfire isn’t the ideal configuration on those. Noise and cooling testing also don't apply here. For synthetic benchmarks, Catzilla was the only benchmark that had any trouble. It worked fine unlike my GTX 1070 SLI testing where it would just crash. But the results matched the single card results.

For games, the following games aren’t included Hitman 2016, Ashes of the Singularity, The Division, and Thief. Thief had no improvement but didn’t drop in performance. The Division saw a 7 FPS drop and in Hitman 2016 I saw a 10 FPS drop across the board. Then in Ashes of the Singularity I saw a 3 FPS drop in DX11 but in DX12 the game crashes when I try to load it with our crazy setting with multiple GPUs turned on. This is a known issue that is included in the most recently AMD Catalyst driver notes, so hopefully that issue will be fixed soon. 

Anyhow on to the results!

Power Usage and Final Thoughts

If you didn’t take a look at the benchmark results on the previous page the two RX 470’s kicked some butt in 3DMark. I was expecting the two cards to fall near the GTX 1070 but in 3DMark they actually outperformed the GTX 1080 on the performance setting. The lower vRAM did come into effect when the resolution was turned up and the GTX 1080 did outperform the 470’s in Crossfire in the Extreme and Ultra settings. In Valley Benchmark doubling up the cards took us from 48.8 FPS to 77.1 but this was still less than the GTX 1070 and the GTX 970 Ti. In game, things were a little more hit and miss. Four of our benchmark games didn’t have an improvement or actually dropped in performance compared to a single card but in the other 7 games, the 470’s in Crossfire came in near the GTX 1070 in most cases. A few it was ahead and a few were below, but they were always close.

I also took a look at the overall power usage of the cards when in Crossfire. Remember that both cards pulled a lot more power than I expected when running individually, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when they topped the charts here. It is interesting though that the two 470’s are close to the GTX 1070 in performance in most benchmarks assuming Crossfire is supported but the two cards actually pulled 110 more watts than TWO GTX 1070’s did in SLI for me. A lot of that is because the two aftermarket RX 470’s I tested with were overclocked and the Sapphire especially had its power turned way up. Anyhow here are the results.

So is picking up a pair of RX 470’s a good buy. Well for starters this is an interesting one because Nvidia doesn’t really have anything to compete with the RX 470 right now and even the GTX 1060 doesn’t support SLI, so AMD is on their own with these lower priced multi-card configurations. AMD doesn’t publish a list of games with Crossfire support like Nvidia does, so as always, before even considering picking up a second card you should check to see if the games that you actually play support it. Because all of the performance in the world won’t matter if the games you play don’t support it. So are you better off picking up two RX 470’s or one GTX 1070? Well if you play a variety of games the single card solution is going to be the better option, simply because it will perform the best in every game. But assuming your favorite games support Crossfire, picking up two RX 470’s is going to get you similar and sometimes better performance than the GTX 1070. Considering those two cards would be cheaper than even the cheapest GTX 1070 right now, it would be a good buy. Especially for AMD fans who can’t wait for Vega. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.