Card Layout and Photos
So the RX 460 is clearly an XFX card, but it doesn’t really look anything like their current cards. They went a little old school to the all metal design from the 7000 series cards and I’m not upset about it at all. I used to run four XFX 7970’s and loved the all metal cooler design but they moved away from it to a cheaper plastic design to keep up with the competition. That said the RX 460 Slim looks great and feels really solid in hand with its metal fan shroud packed full of heatsink. The cooler runs a single 80mm fan and the fan looks mostly like a standard XFX fan only this design pushes air across the card not down.
The single slot design fits tight against the PCB to have as much cooling room as possible. So there aren’t any heatpipes and the heatsink sits right on the GPU and the memory as well. The heatsink is a solid machined design not like the sheet metal heatsinks in most CPU and GPU coolers. The cooler pushes air out the end of the card and towards the PCI slot cover end as well. It doesn’t vent out that direction, though when you look at it from the bottom you can see that the cooler leaves a 3-inch gap at the end for the air to blow out the bottom of the card. The top of the card is completely clean with an all black finish and no venting or logos.
The back of the card shows off the flat black PCB. We can also see that the GPU mounting points are just about in the center of the fan area of the cooler and that is all that keeps the heatsink and shroud on the card. Like I mentioned in the opening of this article, the 460 Slim also doesn’t have a power connection. They pull all of the needed power right off the PCI bus, keeping the design simple and making it perfect for PCs that may not have any extra power plugs like OEM builds.
The single PCI slot cover doesn’t have room for anything but the basics. There aren’t any vents and they went with just one DVI, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort connection. This covers most possible connections needed and still leaves room for people to run multiple monitors if needed though you might have to run adapters depending on your monitor.
