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.
