They speed up or slow down based on load, all the way down to going completely idle (and silent) when you aren’t gaming. Those fans have some nifty tricks up their sleeves, too. The XFX Radeon RX 460 features a pair of small mid-sized fans sitting atop a basic aluminum heatsink. It could also power a kick-ass small form-factor home-theater PC, especially since the Radeon RX 460 supports HDMI 2.0b and high-dynamic range video.
#AMD RADEON RX 460 UPGRADE#
That makes the RX 460 a potentially compelling option as an upgrade for prebuilt big box machines (from Dell, HP, et cetera) that lack extra power connectors. But the conservative design not only allows AMD and its partners to offer the Radeon RX 460 at an affordable price, it also reduced the TDP of the reference version to a mere 75 watts-low enough that it can be powered solely by your motherboard’s PCIe slot, without any extra power connectors whatsoever.
This won’t be a bridge burner, in other words. The most affordable model packs 2GB of RAM-though 4GB versions will also be available-over a smaller 128-bit memory bus. The RX 460 features a severely cut-down version of AMD’s new 14nm Polaris GPU, with half as many ROPs and less than half as many compute units and stream processors as the RX 470. The Radeon RX 470’s reference specifications. As a graphics card devoted to e-sports and entry-level gaming, the Radeon RX 460 sports much more modest internals than the Radeon RX 480 ($200 and up on Newegg) or even the Radeon RX 470 ($180 and up on Newegg).